The Leeds Improvement Commission, set up in 1755, made it illegal for residents to “expose their stallions for the purposes of mating with mares in the public street.” It worked. Nowadays mares can roam anywhere in the city confident they’ll not risk exposure to sex-pest stallions. Actually, not quite everywhere. Catch the 85 bus through the edgier of the city’s edgelands and you’ll see what I mean. There are still great swathes of Belle Isle and Middleton Park where Improvement is a crazy, wishful, faraway dream. Mind your mares in LS10!
Besides the pressing issue of hormonal horses, the Improvement Commission was mainly concerned with tackling a range of “Outrages and Disorders” that made the streets unsafe, unpleasant and uninviting places. “ashes, rubbish, dust, timber, dirt, dung, filth, tubs and other annoyances” were not allowed to be dumped in the open street and citizens were required to “sweep up the rubbish outside their doors at 3 o’clock every Saturday afternoon, and leave it in a pile ready to be taken away.” Later scavengers were employed to keep the streets clean.
The Improvement Commissioners were a bit of a rabble – a bunch of misfits, do-gooders and malcontents – and not the sort of people you’d trust to provide stable, reliable, efficient administration of services to a growing city. They soon gave way to the less dramatic but more democratic (and bureaucratic) type of council we know and love these days. Today’s scavengers get a uniform and union rates. That’s an improvement.
Not everything has seen gradual improvement, however. According to the local paper things are actually getting worse and outrageous and disorderly behaviour is on the rise again. Our streets are under assault from a “plague of flytipping, dog fouling, littering, anti-social behaviour and noise nuisance.” Crime and grime blight our neighbourhoods. The stable, reliable, bureaucratic approach isn’t working anymore, they argue. We need a campaign. It’s time to go Rambo. Increased fines for feral behaviour. Prosecution for the brazenly anti-social. Punishment for the wrong doers. Protection for the tax-payers.
As for the rest of us, we simply have to rekindle our community spirit, reknit the bonds of neighbourliness and reinvigorate our civic pride. Or at least tidy our back yards and stop chucking nappies out on the street. We’ve got to show the kids what’s right.
Will any of this make a difference?
Will a punitive approach promote community?
Can calling on people to show a sense of civic pride in the absence of any reason or understanding how that develops be anything but windy rhetoric?
Does this “campaign” even make any sense?
Well, I don’t really know. But here’s a thought…
There’s a lot of talk in Leeds about the bid for European Capital of Culture 2023. The council want it to be about the whole city, a city where every neighbourhood is involved, where every community has cultural value, where culture isn’t contained, confined and controlled in a certified cultural quarter. Lots of local culture producers are excited about the bid. But the excitement doesn’t seem to have spread that far outside the usual enclave. There’s still a chasm between the culturally connected and the “crime and grime” ridden parts of the city. So here’s an opportunity… a new Leeds Improvement Commission. Get the current lot of misfits, do-gooders and malcontents – or artists as we call them these days, the products of art college and drama schools – involved in the city and the real problems faced by its citizens right now. Don’t wait to wow them in 2023, show the people of Armley and Beeston and Cottingley and so on the value of culture. Solve some pressing problems. Arts and culture against crime and grime.
I’m not a details person and I haven’t a clue about funding, but surely a small portion of the budget for managing crime and grime could be diverted for experimental purposes? And some of the 2023 money?
Imagine this… a regular flytipper returns to the scene of the crime with a knackered couch and a broken black and white telly. He’s the very essence of anti-social. He has no respect for authority. The prospect of a fine doesn’t discourage him. He’s not scared of a public servant with a clipboard or a member of the public aglow with civic pride. But what if instead of that he met with a small theatre company dressed as the “A Team”, or a troop of modern interpretive dancers as the Furies from Greek mythology? Or even better, some burlesque performers in a gimp mask and a baby’s nappy… Our flytipping felon may laugh in the face of the local constabulary but I bet he would turn and flee howling in terror from the presence of a couple of strategically trained thespians.
And our nuisance neighbours with their infernal noise in the middle of the night; they must sleep sometime? Then why not wait for them to drop off and get Hope and Social to turn up with the whole community armed with badly tuned ukuleles, a bucketful of cowbells and an unrehearsed anthem?… that would persuade the hardest bastard on earth to behave themselves. Or else we bring in the poets!
Of course these are just fanciful ideas (I doubt the budget would run to Hope and Social these days) but surely it’s worth a go? There’s so much talent in Leeds, why not unleash it on the crime and grime problem, so before 2023 we have a city that’s genuinely a whole city of culture, and wholly cultural. That would be a genuine boost to civic pride and a brilliant way to generate community spirit too. A new Leeds Improvement Act.