Holbeck Underpass . . . click click drone.

When James asked me to write something for the Spaces and Places section of Culture Vulture he mumbled something about sharing our “love affair” with the city. Steady on, I thought. This is Leeds! We don’t go in for that mushy nonsense round these parts. Leave that to the Mancs.

But then I thought about my own experience of love affairs. They tend to be tempestuous, and tormented, and ever so slightly tawdry. Normally nobody approves. Generally no one understands. Usually it ends badly. So perhaps James was right after all. That’s pretty much just like Leeds.

I’m actually writing this in the structure I want to talk about, the Holbeck Underpass, crouched on a low, cold, concrete ledge that serves as a seat for any passing soul who wants to stop for five minutes to gasp on a fag or glug down a few Happy Shopper tinnies. I suspect I am possibly the first person to compose a blog post here, though certainly not the first to come with the intent to communicate through the written word. Graffiti covers almost every surface. Whoever commited it needs some lessons in basic English; Damo suck’s cock may happen to be true and could be of interest to many a local gentleman, excepting those of us whose ardour is extinguished owing to the incorrect placement of an apostrophe.

This is not what you’d call a hospitable place. There is shelter, of a sort, from the harshest elements, but it’s hardly first date material. Just a place to get you from a to b, it is brutal, functional, unforgiving.

Not entirely devoid of design, however. They may not be everyone’s idea of decorative but the supporting pillars have a pleasing diamond like shape to them – only a guess but it may be a kind of link to the workhouse gates right around the corner, there’s a vague hint of a resemblance – and some care has gone into making the ceiling an attractive chess board pattern.

There’s also no practical reason for the cobbled walls. The cobbles simply suggest a reference to the old streets of Holbeck. The ledge that stretches along the whole North side is also strictly superfluous – why would anyone think people would want to sit and spend time in a noisy, drafty, dirty hole under a motorway!

If the powers that be are to be believed this place is a “physical and psychological barrier.” It is true that before the M621 was built the moor was bigger and much more attractive and Holbeck was a vibrant, prosperous community. But fetishising the underpass and endowing it with magical powers to prevent people from spending money in the city centre – which, let’s face it, is what all the blather about “connectivity” really boils down to – is disingenuous at the very least. The residents of Holbeck don’t gawp into the depths of the underpass puzzling what lies beyond, and people in Beeston aren’t so gormless they don’t know the way to town. What stops them coming through here isn’t anything to do with dodgy architecture or pitiful town planning – though heaven knows we do deserve better! It’s what I used to call back in the days when I was a bit of a Bolshevik, the dull compulsion of economic necessity. People round here are piss poor but they most definitely are not mesmerised by a bloody flyover. They don’t use the underpass because they don’t see anything for them on the other side.

It’s not as if the place is entirely alien to the locals. Scattered around me are a couple of pizza boxes, a sucked dry plastic bottle of some super strength proprietary cider, numerous cigarette butts, a pair of woolly tights, and several cast off condoms. Evidence that conviviality of a very intimate kind is being enjoyed in the underpass.

In the mornings and early evenings the place is packed with workers trudging wearily towards the city. On weekends groups of skaters and cyclists hang out, practising for hours. Many late nights I’ve come through here and nodded a goodnight to groups of rowdy young East European guys or lone Africans huddled over a single can of Special Brew. On the odd match day, especially if it’s Man Utd, this is a place to avoid; the hooligans have discovered that the underpass is completely undetectable from the police helicopter and a safe place for a scrap.

Holbeck Underpass may not always be used in the manner intended by the authorities, and it is at times ugly, scary, and badly maintained (back to most of my love affairs again!) but it’s hardly a barrier. If we live in a city then most of our lives are spent in places like this, interstitial spaces, areas that we dash through trying not to notice, the nowhere lands we certainly wouldn’t want to advertise. They must affect our psyche somehow. The question is how do we make them better? There are efforts to jolly up the place and make it a bit more colourful, warm, friendly. I’m certainly going to help though I’m skeptical it’ll make any difference till we sort out the social problems that surround the place.