Hyde Park - not a Student Village Actually

letter to papers June 16 plus 2020

So far we’ve had no known cases of Covid 19 in Hyde Park, but the students doing a Cummings seem to be trying their best to change that. In a backstreet only 1000m long we had no less than three parties this Saturday night (14 June) keeping ourselves and our children awake, presently almost unable to function as we face another day and week working from home, often juggling childcare with paid work.

25 years ago we had problems when the drug dealers chose Moorland Road and Hyde Park Road for some pitched battles with the police, and on July 10, 1995 we watched in dismay as the local pub went up in flames and our cars were torched, night after night.

After that local residents decided enough was enough and they created Unity Day (sadly cancelled for Covid this year), in which all people of all walks of life could come together as a community on Woodhouse Moor and take part in activities from dogshows to world music.

But here we are in Hyde Park, a quarter of a century later, many of us ex-Leeds University students ourselves, and the area is falling apart again. Graffiti is not just daubed on walls, it stays on walls, bins are all over the pavement, green and black with the same rubbish in them, regular fly-tipping saw two fridge freezers appear in our back street in the last two weeks [placed upright ready to fall on a child],  and then there’s these parties. And of course there’s drug dealers pulling up in the back street as we sit in the daytime with our kids and grandkids on their scooters and watch small packets exchange hands out of car windows. Sometimes the drugs are delivered to the door, only they get the wrong door – can be rather a frightening experience.

And despite the best intentions and best efforts of Noise Nuisance, they just don’t have the person power, the actual power or the PPE to stop them. The team attends, they leave, the music goes back on. The University Neighbourhood Helpline  knowledges the program the problem but can’t solve it.

We who have settled here have in effect become the protectors of the area, this part of Hyde Park actually being a conservation area, despite which landlords and ladies have paved over three back gardens [creating 8/9 spaces] in the last few months and charge non-residents to treat the street as a carpark.

But what is really keeping us awake right now are the parties. There’s no social distancing, not enough toilets, with partygoers stealing wood from some residents and treating the others gardens as toilets. And the party-goers spill out into St John’s Avenue. The morning after the street is littered with broken glass, vomit, condoms, beer cans, shards of glass.  

If there are police to guards statues of of 18th century racists, surely there’s police enough to stop selfish students keeping us from living our normal lives , and from spreading this virus as they do.

Yours faithfully

                                    [on behalf the Moorland Residents Group]