Notes

Tuesday 10th and Wednesday 11th saw my second visit to my designated district, Beeston and Holbeck.

With the deadline approaching, i returned with cameras and pens and an open mind to try to demistify what the media makes of LS11. The only thing Beeston is famous for in the press is its connections to 7/7, which immediately projects a negative image on the community and, as they tend to, the news likes to make issue of racial and religious tension and the potential backlash such reportage inevitably insites. I grew up in Cleveland, a region synonymous with redundant industry, high unemployment and an exemplorary record for negative social statistics. Racial integration simply does not exist and prejudice is generally speaking still acceptable. I studied in Leeds at university and lived in Woodhouse for a year, then Hyde Park and Burley for two and a half more and loved it - a wonderful model for social harmony on the whole.

I found the reality of Beeston to be somewhat as reported, starting out at Cross Flats park and traveling the expanse of the postcode limits through Cottingley and Beeston Hill. In places, i felt a very honest sense of being intimidated. My impression is of back to back red brick housing, tight alleys and overcrowding in places. I know this is perhaps the norm for most average to poor towns and villages, it wasnt the kind of place you felt secure pulling out a DV cam or even a sketch book in parts. I kept gravitating to the green spaces, the clearings amongst the brick. These are so obviously important and yet so commodified in town planning, not particularly profitable. We all want greenspace in our backyards, we go to parks and woodland to recreate, we return to the ground when were gone and adorn memorial gardens with photographs and flowers. There is an intrinsic relationship with nature and the desire to be aligned with it, perhaps the over populating of residential space and no real sense of valuing escape doesnt solely breed but certainly helps to nurture a sense of individual, human depreciation? Is it that this oppressive social climate becomes a vehicle for disaffected groups to place blame on others, is it a far more primal urge to feel free or at least valued than just your prefered system of belief?

Then we have Holbeck. Experiencing a rapid regeneration and expansion programme - Holbeck Urban Village - this area essentially starts from the rear of the train station and granary wharf and touches borders with Beeston just this side of the M621. It is a thriving business district, vast sections of redundant industry and units being leveled to make way for expensive flats, impressive and beautitul modern buildings made of glass and steel, old insutrial rennovation projects, architects and design offices, media centres. In short, it is being set up as the professional and economic centre, a flagship for the success of Leeds' business enterprise. Conversely, it is a prominant red light district which comes alive in the late afternoon, presumely accomodating for and feeding from the offices and professionals on their way home. I dont intentionally go searching for the underbelly, it really is that blatant! And as an artist i really love this motif of glossing over those elements which dont look so good in the brochure. Im sure all elements of the professional trades are booming down there.

Im not trying to get ideas above my station here, but i desparately didnt want to tackle the surface issues that anyone could google and make a badge about. I really want to know what you all think about my experiences. Im not setting out to be awkward and to look for negative elements but when there is no denying that they exist and that there is such a grossly dis-proportionate investment in quality of status over quality of life, what do you do? The directional problem is that the intention of the Badge Project is to illustrate reasons for the end user to realise and engage with more than just the city centre, so presumably it is a positive image we need to be projecting...
Apologies for the length of this diatribe.
Looking forward to some thoughts.

Si