Leeds and the Aire

Leeds & the Aire: Boff Whalley wonders about our own very local North/South divide …

When I first moved to Leeds in the early 1980s there were two things that surprised me. One was the seemingly universal grumpiness of the bus drivers, the other was the lack of bridges crossing the main river that ran through the city. I’ll pass on writing about the tetchy bus drivers and dive headfirst into the river Aire, a subject that’s long fascinated me. Unlike some other cities, Leeds has always appeared to be a place divided by its river.

Most English towns and cities, including my home town Burnley, are built and founded on rivers. Of course they are: rivers bring trade. But nowhere else other than Leeds have I seen a river bisect a place so neatly – economically, culturally and historically. In an inversion of the old ‘grim up north’ cliché, it’s obvious that Leeds has traditionally had a prosperous north, teeming with students and ex-students, Jewish communities, wealthy manufacturers and semi-rural businessmen and landlords; and a poorer south, full to the brim with Leeds United fans and people who actually work for a living.*

The lack of bridges is puzzling. Considering that the river valley splitting the city from east to west houses not just the Aire but the Leeds-Liverpool canal and the railway, you’d imagine getting across it would have been made a priority, if only so that the workforce could easily flow across it both ways. For a while recently there was much talk in local political circles of widening the bridge at Burley and creating ‘The West Leeds Gateway’. The plan seems to have been quietly dropped.

In 1982, after I’d lived in Leeds less than two years, I somehow, with a group of friends, stumbled into being able to live rent-free in a house in Armley, a mile south of the river. Living there effectively cut us off from the student and ex-student culture that we previously thought typified Leeds, with its cinemas, theatres, music venues and whatnot. It became obvious that, in the main, the huge student population just didn’t ever venture south of the river; all that talent and labour and wealth stayed where it was and fed its own incredible expansion.

When people talk now about the new Leeds, with its wealth and its culture and its pop-up art galleries and its glass ‘n’ metal malls and its street festivals and its cocktail bars and fancy restaurants, they’re talking about wealth that’s exploded somewhere above City Square and fanned out northwards towards Woodhouse and Headingley and on up to Adel and Bramhope. Of course there are exceptions; there are still estates and communities in the north that have been somehow by-passed in the goldrush. But anyone daring to comment on this ‘new’ Leeds has no credibility if they don’t have a nosey around Beeston and Armley, Middleton and Hunslet, and work out just how little all the cash fizzing around the big new ‘retail experiences’ has done for those areas.

It isn’t just money that’s divided the city. Broadly speaking (very broadly speaking) north Leeds has the rugby, south Leeds has the football. And being unfairly flippant, the north had the Mekons, Soft Cell, Cud, Gang of Four, Wedding Present, Sisters of Mercy and Kaiser Chiefs. The south had Hang The Dance and Abrasive Wheels. I think (best ask writer Mick McCann about that). The reason for the imbalance is that – unlike, say, in Manchester, Sheffield or Liverpool – Leeds bands come in the main from the campus, not from the city.

Reading Tony Harrison’s poetry – especially the vitally-important ‘V’, set in a Beeston graveyard – and seeing the history of Leeds United with its single-minded and devoted following, a historic community knitted together in white, blue and yellow, it’s easy to wonder if south Leeds is somehow the ‘real’ Leeds. That the north has seen its ‘Leedsness’ watered-down by the constant influx and outflux (not a word, but it should be) of students who bring their own allegiances, their own versions of the world into the city.

This is to ignore the incomers-turned-locals, the Jews, the Irish, the West Indians, the Asians, and lately, Eastern European migrants settling in Leeds unaware of any historical and geographical divisions. Pockets of the city (north and south) grew and developed around these communities. Thriving and lively, perhaps this ongoing swell of immigration that cares little for the cultural divide of the Aire is just what the city needs.

I’m purposely ignoring, too, the hair’s-breadth encroachment of businesses that have sprouted skywards in the southern shadow of the railways station – despite massive amounts of money on publicity and development, this patch of Holbeck is still little more than a bit of businessy froth spilling outwards from a bursting city centre.

For years I watched how the annual I Love West Leeds festival generated a hopeful and enlivening blend of community and arts in Armley, Bramley and Farnley. How, struggling with lack of funding, people pulled together a few weeks of gatherings, happenings, exhibitions, films and plays. A mate from Beeston used to marvel at this annual splurge of local creativity. He’d wonder how come Armley could have a festival and Beeston couldn’t; I put it down to the tenacity and drive of the organisers, who struggled through on shoestring grants to force something inspiring and genuinely inclusive.

Several years on, and first the Arts Council and then Leeds City Council withdrew their funding for I Love West Leeds. The festival was forced to downsize, event by event, as the council pleaded poverty in the face of ‘austerity’. Meanwhile, in the city centre – north of the river – Trinity’s temple of shopping appeared like a sneer. More Gentlemen’s clubs opened. New hotels seem to appear every six months and all the city centre bars and clubs continue to get more and more full. Where is all that new revenue going? Certainly not to Armley, to Beeston, to south Leeds. Thirty years ago, when I first lived just off Armley Town Street, it was dominated by local butchers, greengrocers and bakeries. Now it’s dominated by a string of Cash Converters and bookies. That doesn’t mean the area isn’t still full of possibilities, just that the implicit message being sent from Leeds North HQ is akin to someone throwing the ballast overboard in order to gain height.

There are people in areas north of the river who might argue that they’ve been similarly jettisoned. Residents of Gipton, Seacroft and Harehills could all put forward good arguments against this broadly-swept version of Leeds history. Nevertheless, my puzzlement remains. The first bridge over the river Aire was built in 1384 in the city centre – prior to that there were only stepping stones and fords. This bridge was presumably intended to unite the settlements on both sides of the river; I’m still not sure if it’s worked.

*Joke

Boff Whalley November 2013