Objections to Woodhouse Moor Land Grab by Leeds Metro

There has been local outrage at Leeds City Council's attempt to slip these planning applications under the radar by not including them in the main Transport and Works Act Order application for the trolleybus, even though they are clearly for that purpose, being included on th  e NGT website.

I have copied my objection to these below in order that those who haven't the time to go through these in detail (for instance I have examined most of these on Google Earth as well as the linked maps).  There is very inadequate explanation of these, one only has six words, so it takes a lot of studying of the maps in order to work out what is intended, and even then it is not always clear.

So there is a broad template here that you can refer to and develop your own objections from.  These are supposed to be in by Saturday 9th Nov 2013 so you need to get them in soon. 

Also I have had to give the email address of a representative of Leeds Legal Services as the NGT page does not give an email address for response, only a ground address, which is being slightly unhelpful in my own view.  I have rung them and asked for a proper address to be put on their page, but it has not happened yet.

Any person who wishes to object to the proposed appropriation should submit written representations to Legal Services, Leeds City Council, Civic Hall, Leeds, LS1 1UR.

Quoting

 Ref A76/DO/094793 by no later than the 9th day of November 2013.

FAO Leeds Legal Services.

 c/o

 Sarah.Blenkin@leeds.gov.uk

Dear Ms Blenkin,

I am writing to you to object to all 9 of the Open Space Appropriations

http://www.ngtmetro.com/Open_Space_Appropriation/          

recently published, since there is no email address on the page where I found the information below and I have been advised that objections addressed to you will be registered.

Firstly may I say that they are badly numbered.  For instance,

Parcel 1 (0.4mb pdf)

is Site 7

Parcel 2 (0.4mb pdf)

is Site 1, and so on, and there are two pages with 'Site 6' or '6' on them 

Several of the sites are referred to as a 'small strip of land'.  I do not believe that a strip such as Site 1 (Parcel 2) which appears to be approximately a quarter of a mile long can be legitimately called 'small'.

Site 8 Parcel 4 (0.3mb pdf) is apparently 173 meters long.  This may be narrow, but it is not 'small'

The loss of public amenity applies to Parcels 1 to 4 all of which are open green space whose amenity to the public would be lost or degraded, including  Parcel 3 (0.3mb pdf)   and this is unacceptable on a mere Planning Committee decision.

I object to these applications.

Woodhouse Moor

Sites 3, 4 and 6   Parcel 5 (0.5mb pdf) and Parcel 6 (0.5mb pdf)

are park and of immense amenity value to the local population for over a century.  It is utterly unacceptable that these should be appropriated on a simple planning committee decision.   This is a conservation area and the most heavily used park in Leeds. I object to these applications.

The row of trees along the grass verge is included within the delineated area which goes up to the modern low railing.  This would appear to suggest the possibility of their felling which must not be allowed.  There are over twenty trees along this line, over half of which are of significant age.  The land take also includes trees in an open area of both grass and pavement at the Hyde Park end by the sports areas, which is also an area of social amenity that would be lost.

The loss of this strip would denude the side of the park.  The inner tarmac paved pathway is popular with joggers and to reduce to one pavement alone would probably be unsafe for normal pedestrians at peak times.  If this was taken a new path would need to be made within the new edge of Woodhouse Moor and the oldest public park in Leeds would be eroded where there is already the widest section of road on the A660 between the University and West Park.  Even if the NGT scheme went ahead this land would not be needed, or at least not under the plans given so far in submission.

 The wide York Stone paving all along this side is a fine piece of street architecture and probably has conservation status.  It is most attractive and is accompanied by a grass verge which raises the inner path to a higher level than the road and provides a suitable buffer between the park and the busy road, besides which it is one of the principle and busiest routes on foot from the University to Hyde Park, Woodhouse and Headingley.  If this land were to be appropriated for road use, then a similar width of land would need to be taken from Woodhouse Moor to replace the pavement.  This is no less than simply attempting to take parkland for road and not even having the decency to include it in the main plans for the trolleybus route which would subject it to a public enquiry.  It is dishonourable in the extreme.

In fact, looking closely at the pdf map, I am minded to say that the proposed land acquisition covers the grass verge and inner pathway, but not the York stone paving.  Is this graphic intentional?  Do Metro and Highways already claim the right to remove this (conservation) stone pavement?  If not then the map is erroneous and thus the submission would be void. 

This whole piece of land is most attractive and strongly mitigates the impact of a busy road passing by it besides which it is one of the principle and busiest routes on foot from the University to Hyde Park, Woodhouse and Headingley.

It is not clear from Parcel 5 (0.5mb pdf) why the land on Monument Moor has been included.  Has there been an increase in desired land take over and above the already submitted applications?  Are any trees included?  I object to this application. 

The small road at the top of this page (either site 3 or 6, it is not clear which) is unnecessary.   It would go through some green space and a children’s playground besides several mature trees some of which are quite likely as old as the layout of the Moor itself.  Since none of the trees are notated in the maps given it is not clear which ones are threatened, however, there are 4 mature trees of at least a century vintage and probably significantly more where the proposed new road would come out on Woodhouse street, and another where the new road would meet Woodhouse Cliff.  At a time when tree loss and climate change is such a concern, felling mature trees of this quality should not be considered.

All of these ‘appropriations’ are for the purpose of the trolleybus.  Why were they not included in the application for the Transport and Works Act Order?  And why were they not mentioned at either of the Plans Panel full day sessions in June and October?  There has been much discussion of the route over Monument Moor, but not one mention of the land grab on the south side of Woodhouse Lane which is clearly intended for an expansion of the road into another lane for the trolleybus and traffic ‘stacking’.

There is no substantive difference between these and any other of the planning applications made over this, except that these are green space.

Parcel 7 (0.3mb pdf)

Site 9  I object to this application.  This is a piece of green space in an extremely built up area and should be preserved.  The building of a road would not only take out valuable car parking space but the access to the main road would almost certainly disrupt traffic flow on it.  Traffic flow is to my understanding one of the primary reasons for this ill advised scheme, so for road alterations which interrupt that flow seems contrary to common sense.

Parcel 8 (0.3mb pdf)

Site 5  An already immensely built up area, I object to this application.  It needs no more buildings on the limited green spaces.  I imagine that this application would not be necessary should the intention have been only to plant trees on it.

Parcel 9 (0.3mb pdf

This is labelled Site 6, although Parcel 5 (0.5mb pdf)

Also has a ‘6’ on it.

I am referring to the application to take land from Belle Isle Circus.  I object to this application.   This is parkland with semi mature trees.  It is absolutely unacceptable to take this parkland merely on a planning committee decision, and should not in principle be considered as it is land which belongs to the community.  There is at least one park bench on the land which is directly in the path of the intended route and this is quite clearly a public amenity which would be lost and for which there could be no local replacement.

Finally, I should like to complain that there has been no email address placed on the NGT site where I found these links. http://www.ngtmetro.com/Open_Space_Appropriation/

I spoke to a Mr Hacker about this today, and although he assured me he would put an email address on the page, this has not happened.  In an era when we are all encouraged to use email instead of paper, it is absolutely unacceptable to be posting pages such as these without a proper response form as is usually the case with planning applications or even an email address which one may make one’s objections too.  This following, I believe it was, 34 conservation and listed building applications which needed to be responded to.  The way this has been handled is such that it is either incompetent or it has been constructed so as to minimise the likelihood that objections would be registered.

Yours sincerely,

..........

(You must include your name and address otherwise your objection will be disregarded.)

Tolkien and Headingley : 2

Tolkien and Headingley : 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MYdueWrb8yM


Recently on my cosmicclaire.blogspot.com blog I introduced some ideas about Tolkien and his five year stay in Headingley and hereabouts when he taught Anglo-Saxon at Leeds University just up the road.

Not only are there, or were there, landmarks and landscape which can be descried as influences in Tolkien's work, or so I believe, but equally importantly they fit in with the way that his mind worked, his obsessions with languages, trees, roots, roads, pathways and all.

It is my belief that I have stumbled upon a previously unrecognised influence on Tolkien's work.  I have been working on this idea for a while now, and it came almost unbidden in response to my consideration of how Tolkien would feel about the loss of trees that he himself would have known to the insane depredations of trolleybus bypass ecovandals.

My own feeling is that the people need to be roused as Treebeard was in Lord of the Rings and not let their beautiful Shire be cut down by minds of metal and wheels.

My blogspot piece on this from last week
http://cosmicclaire.blogspot.co.uk/2013/07/tolkien-and-headingley.html


© Claire Rae Randall 12 July 2013

Tolkien and Headingley

Tolkien and Headingley

It is not without some little trepidation that I post this short essay to the internet. 

Doubtless I will be sandwiched between disparaging dismissal that this thesis is a baseless fantasy on my part, or else that it is already a commonplace which all who truly know Tolkien or anything about his sojourn in Leeds have known since before the ark.

I claim to be no special Tolkien scholar and I have not read even a tithe of his posthumously published work, but I have lived in or near Headingley for close to four decades and have developed a close feeling for the place.  When my own interest in reading his works grew earlier this year I found myself thinking more and more about how he would have experienced the village suburb and began to try to imagine it through his eyes, through his imagination.

This may be a commonplace thesis which others have reached before me.  If so, then I concede to them their prior discovery.  But I have done several internet searches, and the dominant result for ‘Tolkien and Headingley’ brings me to the blue plaque recently placed on the house in West Park in which he lived for the last two years of his stay here, and no further.

What you are about to read here, is at least to me, the first time that this interpretation of his stay in the area has been stated.  

It is unpolished as I have been exploring this and writing it down as it has come to me, but it seems to be such a secret in plain sight and so obvious an interpretation that it might just fall out into anyone’s mind who gave it half a moment’s thought, and so I put it out there with no further delay.  This is evolving in my mind all the time and there will be more to come on this, some of which I already have in my mind.

A long time ago I heard that Tolkien had lived in Leeds, near Woodhouse Ridge and that some of the local features had inspired locations in his work.

As a long term resident of Headingley, and reader of Tolkien since childhood, this intrigued me. I instantly thought of one area that jumped out at me, but that was as far as it went at the time. This was Woodhouse Ridge, which has always reminded me of Ithilien, for its beautiful wooded slopes and pathway along its side. Another detail I shall come back to seems to be in just the right place and is wonderfully characteristic.

Last year I reread The Hobbit for the umpteenth time, and started The Book of Lost Tales, but it was rather hard work, and I decided that I needed to read The Silmarillion again before I attempted it. Something that had intrigued me however, was Tolkien’s use of the idea of the ancient city of Kôr which curiously I had just read about in H. Rider Haggard’s ‘She’. This was one of the most successful books of the late nineteenth century, and it was inconceivable that Tolkien had not been aware of it, or that he had not read it.

Whilst there is no counterpart of Kôr in Leeds to my knowledge! it did show me how he would take influences and use them in his work. It is also the name of the bed of Hel, the Norse goddess of the underworld and death, but this seems more of an influence on Haggard’s than Tolkien’s Kôr. 

So I put the Lost Tales to one side, and read lots of CS Lewis last year. Exhausting my available resources in that department, at the beginning of this year I came back to Tolkien, not least due to the influence of Malcolm Guite, chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, who had published some superb podcasts on the Inklings and their importance to the modern world of eco spirituality, amongst other things.

I could put off rereading The Lord of the Rings no longer, for perhaps the dozenth time or so, but it was over a decade since the last so it didn’t feel self indulgent. 

Tolkien and Headingley

Pt 2

I’m a bit of a Jenny come lately to Tolkien and Headingley ~ I didn’t hear about the plaque on his old house in Darnley Road, West Park until some while after it had gone up.  I may have been a lifelong reader of Tolkien, but it is a very recent development that I have got into the animistic side of MiddleEarth, which combines both the ethical and eco spiritual sides.

My own interest in the mythic landscape of the local area has taken a life of its own over the last year or so and with the focus on protecting Headingley from a destructive bypass for an inefficient trolleybus scheme that has developed since, I have begun to think about what Tolkien would feel about trees that he knew on his daily journey to the University being cut down.

The next thing of course is to think of stories where trees are cut down; first to mind was CS Lewis’s The Last Battle where the Calormenes are cutting down Lantern Waste which has great meaning for me, but in Tolkien’s work it is the trees of Fangorn Forest which were being cut.  A few weeks before I had observed to a friend that the Councillors who are hell bent on destroying the most beautiful part of Headingley had minds of metal and wheels, just like Saruman who saw everything in terms of how he could use it and didn’t respect it for its own intrinsic worth and beauty.

I began to think of Tolkien within this very landscape ninety years ago, and what it must have been like then.  His own vision of the land with its mythopoeic resonances led me to the defining seed of Headingley, the Shire Oak, which was still standing in his time.  A photograph a friend found on the web of the Oak has strengthened my intuition that this is the seminal Treebeard.

Just as Treebeard is the chief of all the trees in MiddleEarth, so the Shire Oak is the chief of all trees in the Shire of which it is the centre.  And so here we have the other core feature of Headingley which I believe was an influence on his ideas, the Shire.  It is inconceivable to me that his creation of the Shire as the starting point and foundation on which the Hobbit is written would have no reference in it to the Shire [Oak] that he had known a decade and more earlier. 

Tolkien was, in the eyes of some, a terrible plagiarist.  All the names of the Dwarves in The Hobbit are taken from Norse myths, and many of the themes in his grand mythology were modelled on the archetypal characters and dynamics of the same.  King Theoden has strong resonances of Beowulf.  He openly acknowledged all this, but did not consider it plagiarism, simply a modern reworking of ancient and universal themes.  In Jungian terms, the dynamics of the archetypes of the collective unconscious.

It is harder to imagine that Tolkien would not be influenced by such numinous beings as the Shire Oak and its ancient cultural context than to suggest that he drew on such things in his work.  Having delved into his mind and grasped his bardic vision, one can walk more fully in his world. 

The Shire Oak, Headingley

Treebeard?

All his life Tolkien saw through into a mythic level of reality where dragons flew and trees walked and talked.  What more likely vision could there be for him than the massive and ancient Shire Oak as some anthropomorphic creature, which it did actually look like from the photograph.

Before I saw the photo (I had seen another much less detailed previously) I mentioned to my friend about this, and his immediate response was ‘And the Shire…’

So here we have an ancient landmark dating to the Anglo Saxon period ~ Tolkien’s particular special subject, being Professor of Anglo Saxon ~ which it must be inconceivable that he did not take a great interest in, and its name is the same as the name of the home of his heroes in the Hobbit and Lord of the Rings.  Besides which, Tolkien himself is largely a mix between a Hobbit and an Ent, if you set aside his elvishness.

Going deeper, one must realise that Headingley in the early 1920s was a village like suburb that was quite rural, intermingled on the outskirts up to Beckett Park with farmland.  Even now there are still stables nearby in the Meanwood Valley.

Headingley on the Hill, a sleepy rural suburb away from the busy city, where people liked to mind their own business and be left alone, with a Shire Oak, rather like Hobbiton on the Hill where people like to mind their own business and be left alone in their Shire with a large Party Tree.

Conjecture ~ perhaps.  Speculation ~ maybe.  I have seen no documentation that Tolkien made any deliberate or specific literary allusion to these features or that they may have had some imaginative influence on his landscapes and settings.  However there are other parallels in his life.  It is well known that the Warwickshire of his childhood was his model for Kortirion in The Book of Lost Tales, a posthumously published compilation of early work edited by his son Christopher.  His wartime experiences in the Battle of the Somme influenced his work deeply over many years from stories in the Silmarillion to Frodo’s visions of long perished warriors in the Dead Marshes.

How much would the gentle world of Headingley in the 1920s be valued by Tolkien after the horror of the trenches?  Hobbiton and the Shire have in literary criticism been compared to wish fulfilment fantasies, almost a return to the security of childhood.  A secure place in the mind to go to escape the post traumatic stress inflicted by the Somme.  Headingley, still perhaps retained a ghost of the Edwardian Belle Epoque.

My mother has told me that after the Second War everyone used to talk about ‘getting back to how it used to be before the War’.  How so this must also have been the desire following the Armistice.  After a short sojourn at Oxford working on the Dictionary his appointment at Leeds University must have been valued as also giving him the opportunity to escape to a place where the past still lingered.  The sleepy suburb of Headingley with its Anglo-Saxon roots and ancient trees must have been a much appreciated discovery for him.

It has been noted on many occasions his special feeling toward trees, which comes out again and again in his literary works.  His arrival in a location where a truly ancient tree already revered by the Anglo-Saxons was still extant must have seemed serendipitous to him and cannot have failed to arouse his imagination.

Not that he moved immediately to Headingley.  His first residence was apparently near the University on St Mark’s Terrace, now demolished.  But that was near Woodhouse Ridge, which bears a strong resemblance to the land of Ithilien in The Two Towers.  A feature which strikes me as strengthening this link is the ginnel, a narrow stone passageway, which cuts up from the steepest part of the Ridge and over the top to the other side.  Overlooking this is an ornate building with an oriel window that looks somewhat like a tower.  The Pass of Cirith Ungol with its Tower guarding it.  To Tolkien old Woodhouse nearby might well have seemed like Mordor.

The mythic dream landscape mixes up images from daily life and reinterprets them creating a gestalt of new meaning, allowing expression of deeper archetypal feelings.   

The half decade of stability that Tolkien and Edith knew at Leeds after the turbulence of the war must have been of value for a greatly needed time of healing.

Much has often be made of the parallels between Frodo’s wound and his inability to find peace of mind back in the Shire despite trying, and Tolkien’s own psychic wounds from the Western Front.  Headingley may not have given him all the healing he needed, perhaps he would never find that, but like the Shire it was somewhere he was willing to give it a try, and perhaps that is why its resonance breaks through with some of the most innocent and benign aspects of MiddleEarth, while even the memory of Mordor still lurks over the hill, at the end of the pass, a memory which may not fully manifest itself, but which stalks like a Ringwraith.  What more comforting security than the Shire, but not just the Shire, but the Shire with Treebeard at its centre. 

There are other possibilities for seed ideas between Headingley and the Shire, but these are at the core.  Treebeard, the Shire and the Shire Oak.  And their importance to the evolving symbolic expressions of Tolkien’s deepest archetypal feeling.

Perhaps one can go so far with this that one is simply seeing the projection of one’s own desire to see the world of MiddleEarth around one.  But given the known historical relation of Tolkien to this place, with its own Anglo-Saxon history which must have been of interest to perhaps the greatest Anglo-Saxon scholar of the twentieth century, it would be entirely lacking in imagination to refuse to see the potential for inspiration presented to him.  And imagination is one thing old Tollers had in abundance.

Many thanks and much gratitude to Bill McKinnon for his correlation of the Shire of MiddleEarth with the Shire Oak of Headingley when I told him of my Treebeard correlation.

© Claire Rae Randall 2 July 2013

Residents' Objection to Trolleybus Scheme (Headingley)

This is the text of the objection I made at the Leeds Planning Panel on Tuesday 25th June 2013.

I was allowed six minutes to speak so was unable to include every point I would have liked to.  At the end of this I have attached some of the points I had to trim due to constraint of time.

As a resident of Leeds who may be forced to pay for this project, I wish firstly to state the overwhelming opposition of the community to it and our belief that it is a waste of government and Council tax payers’ money at a time of austerity. 

My comment on this section is that while the aims of a trolleybus system may seem laudable, it would irrevocably damage Headingley. Our beautiful heritage area would be carved up for what has been acknowledged by Richard Lewis as being a Highways scheme more than one of public transport, and I believe, be held up as an example of short-sighted thinking in years to come once the damage was seen.

I understand that older residents of Bramley still mourn the loss of the original character of their area. I can only hope that Councillors will think again and not inflict a similar fate on Headingley.

Councillor Carter has stated that it is ‘not the preferred option’ and has referred to ‘NGT with its undoubted problems’ and Cllr Golton has said that there are ‘questions unanswered’.

Some of the problems and questions which have not been properly addressed at consultation concern the loss of heritage in what is largely a Conservation area, where there are many trees of mature years, some dating from Victorian times, and detriment to English Heritage listed structures.

There are more mature trees, stone walls, old Victorian buildings, communities and other things of value on this stretch which would be threatened with destruction and consequent loss of character to the area, and other issues, than I can itemise in the time allotted to me.

From Alma Road, where a 19^th century cottage with architectural character in good repair is in question behind the Arndale centre where stone walls would be lost and dozens of mature trees would have to be cut down.

On Wood Lane mature trees and a large late Victorian house which is occupied and in good repair would be lost, making homeless some seven people including two children who attend Shire Oak School very nearby and one adult who has lived there for 20 years.

Headingley Hall retirement home would have its buffer of beautiful mature trees stripped away and a swathe cut through those on Shire Oak Road, behind the Telephone Exchange, Ivy Lodge and the old gatehouse now of St Columba’s church, where a representative has told me his community supports this objection. St Columba’s and its caretaker's lodge would be on a traffic island effectively, sandwiched between roads.

Across the meadows of Headingley Moor, the last remnant of Kirkstall Abbey sheep grange, more Victorian planted trees would be taken down and partial loss of an old stone wall would occur. New plantings to replace the loss of century plus old trees is not acceptable.

Every inch of the proposed bypass route is already either usefully employed or beautified by nature and heritage. There is no brown field or derelict land.

On Headingley Lane the setback of walls required for the proposed road widening would be extensive, needing to build up several meters in places and Rose Court children’s playground would be severely reduced. From Ford House to the end of the former Leeds Girls’ High School there are at least four listed structures of which three would be affected or demolished. Under the 1990 Planning and Listed Buildings Act there should be no detriment to these or their curtilage.

Morley House Trust for the former Leeds Girls’ High, Ford House and Rose Court have expressed support for this objection.

All along this section of road are mature trees right up to the small businesses at the end which would be lost. 

The redesign of Victoria Road junction and Hyde Park would involve loss of green and buildings.

It is a plan which would spend 90% of its capital budget on the road building and only 10% on the transport itself.

Richard Lewis has told me in response to a direct question ‘Will it be stopped if the local people don’t like it?’ ~ ‘Absolutely’ he said.

All the local resident and community groups that I am aware on the route of are against it.

The sheer immensity of the destruction and upheaval in an area so rich in visually aesthetic heritage and environment would in my own view as a professionally qualified Art Therapist be detrimental to the wellbeing of local residents for the loss of aesthetic surroundings, especially to the old and vulnerable who would likely suffer a significant degree of culture shock due to the perceptual stress of seeing so much of their accustomed local world destroyed before their very eyes, in order to satisfy the travel needs of passers through.

On the principle of ‘make polluter pay’ it is these people who should be made to take some responsibility for the problems they cause with their traffic, and not make the local residents pay with the destruction of their heritage.

I would invite Councillors to walk this section of the route with me and witness firsthand the many beautiful mature trees which have intrinsic value in their own right and make the character of Headingley what it is before voting to destroy them, their surroundings and their contribution to air quality which would not be helped by the failure to reduce existing traffic.

You do not preserve the environment by destroying it.

It has come to my attention and I understand that at the city centre plans panel in 2005, Councillor Taggart said "Headingley is the jewel in the crown of Leeds and we should welcome anything that benefits Headingley". This would not benefit Headingley, and I should like to ask Councillor Taggart and all Councillors to benefit Headingley now, by rejecting these plans.

Additional comments:

Although concerns about local air quality were a significant driver to the project, air quality would actually be worse, since it has been acknowledged that with this scheme traffic on Headingley Lane is unlikely to become less, and cutting down so many trees would be to the detriment of air quality.  You clearly cannot improve air quality if you cut down a massive number of mature trees while at the same time allowing traffic to continue at the same levels or even increase.  

The Exchequer has actually estimated that something over a million pounds a year in increased revenue would accrue from traffic usage on Otley Road/ Headingley Lane and Woodhouse Lane.  This is an acknowledgement that the prioritisation of the trolleybus would cause increased congestion ~ part of the scheme involves deliberate stacking of traffic to allow trolleybus priority which is the only way it can achieve the paltry time savings which are claimed.  If this did not occur, it would not be able to achieve any improvement.  This also would penalise the buses which currently run on the route, which would probably lose customers as a result and so local residents would suffer a reduction in the service which suits their needs.

Something I feel strongly about is that the proposed trolleybus route behind the Arndale Centre would not only require the felling of some thirty or so mature trees (very conservative rough estimate, could well be much more) but it would allow the trolleybus route to pass over the spot where the Yorkshire Ripper’s final victim, Jacqueline Hill was murdered.  It is disquieting to many of religious belief and none that thousands of people are expected to pass daily over this unfortunate spot.

When I put this to my local Councillor John Illingworth (who actually mentioned the spot before I did as an opportunity for a bypass) he said that there can't be many spots where people have not died and so this is no reason to prevent such a route.  My own response to this is not just any death.  

This is the most infamous and tragic death within the living memory of those resident in Headingley, and probably way back for many generations.  I well recall shopping near here on the Saturday afternoon following the dreadful event and at a quarter past five people had all fled the streets, leaving them bare and deserted.  I too wanted to get home as quickly as possible, and simply passing near the end of Alma Road was bad enough.

The proposed route of the bypass and road widening on Headingley Lane reads as a one of ill repute.

Coming from the Hyde Park end, we would have: destruction of small businesses, demolition and detriment to several English Heritage listed buildings and structures, the loss of a children's playground, destruction of dozens of mature trees, many dating from the mid nineteenth century, and some from before, the felling of mature trees in front of Headingley Hall retirement home, stripping bare the buffer between the residents and the main road, the demolition of a perfectly good house and the making homeless of its seven occupants, of whom two are children and go to the nearest school, Shire Oak, the taking down of old Yorkshire style stone walls, and ending with the route passing over the tragic murder spot.

This is a path of ill omen, and is only a mile or so of the route which I am most concerned with, but the swathe of destruction would go for the entire eight or nine miles of the route.  In a world where human and spiritual values were not considered of lesser importance to economic 'development' it would be seen immediately that such a catalogue of mishap should be a clear indication that it is simply wrong to try and destroy these things for the benefit of those who wish to pass through our beautiful suburb.

Human rights, environmental heritage and ecology must be put before the ephemeral requirements of commuters.

I would urge all residents of Headingley and Leeds to write to their councillors and strongly urge them to abandon this folly.

These Councillors especially are responsible for attempting to inflict this on our communities and our environment.
 
keith.wakefield@leeds.gov.uk              Chief Executive Leeds City Council
richard.lewis@leeds.gov.uk                  Chief Officer for Development
james.lewis@leeds.gov.uk                     Head of Leeds Metro Transport

Leeds City Council Exec Board Meeting Video Blog 19 June 2013

Tonight I talk about today's Leeds City Council Exec Board meeting which I attended and deconstruct the tactics which they are taking to persuade, coax or perhaps gently coerce the people of Leeds that it is in their interests to have a trainwreck tsunami of road development sweep through their communities.

What with the Exec Board members talking about consultation as a means to the end of getting the people on board the truth is exposed that this is no more than a propaganda exercise, confirmed by the neuro-linguistic programming used by the NGT lobby.  And I forgot to mention that one of the Councillors actually said 'We have got to do a better selling job!'  Condemned out of their own mouths...