The Great Collective University Inertia

My Open Letter to All the Leeds Universities Aigust 21 2020 Dear Universities, This is it. It is 10 weeks of relentless antisocial distasteful partying on an industrial level, by “entitled” young so-called adults who treat us, all year round residents like dirt, and by not pulling them up on their appalling, selfish, life-threatening behaviour, you are treating us like dirt. It’s one excuse after another. “They’re not all from our university. “ “Are you sure it was No 6?” “We can’t do anything until October.” “We don’t have all their addresses” “They’re not back at university until autumn.” “It’s the landlord/lady’s responsibility”. Out of the long-term residents in just one small street there are now three that we know of down at the local surgery on a regular basis, ill, signed off, or unfit for work, who have serious illnesses, all originating in stress-related conditions. The cost to the health service, to social services, just in monetary terms is already stacking up. Then we read there is an article in the local newspaper about why we should learn to love our universities. Apparently it’s because they benefit the Leeds economy, as so many people work for them. In Hyde Park and all over Headingley people’s careers, lives, health, happiness, families everything is in ruins and tatters just so that Leeds can be the best (really!) city in the north. In Moorland Road and Avenue alone we are teachers, university lecturers, doctors, builders, charity workers, retired people, social workers, garage mechanics, musicians, visual artists, university admin assistants, and real students (as in came here to study), a total mix of people who maintain this area the whole year around have been abandoned and left and hung out to dry by an uncaring council, incompetent police force and self-serving, self-seeking, entitled universities. Colleges who are spending their money rebranding themselves as universities and conservatories in order to enhance their status, universities spending millions on fancy new buildings, and heaven help anybody who went to university in Leeds, liked the area, and stayed on loyally to preserve and look after it. Heaven help anyone who mistook a beautiful Moor and beautiful Victorian architecture for a place of beauty and safety in which to pass a decade or two of their post-graduate life. There is a great collective inertia, and one part of Leeds in which society's have just been abandoned. Bad enough in a "normal" year, but inexcusable in a global pandemic.

When all the students come back

Well , who is looking forward to the students returning to their uni towns? I will tell you who: university finance departments, landlords and ladies, Sainsbury’s. Once this list would have included bars and pubs, and local shops. Once it would be local residents looking forward to new trends in music and art, and even philosophical debates down the Royal Park Pub. Most, if not all university lectures can be online. Practicals obviously need equipment, but possibly students could to access that at a local home university. Quite this a drastic step I realise. This would involve cooperation between institutions, but hey, this is a global pandemic, but I say where there’s a will... It seems that the exasperated parents have already dropped off and got rid of the most determinedly antisocial partygoers, probably a thousand or so, given the reports we have from Moorland Avenue, Saint John’s Avenue, Hyde Park Road, Cardigan Road, the Norwoods, Victoria Road, the Broomfields, the Langdales. But many more thousands are set to descend on the city. We hear of one uni has actually asking students to come back early. Is to this ensure they will get their fees, or to get them inside the city boundary before lockdowns return? Hopefully these are students who have come here to study. Nonetheless they will have been looking forward to freedom, freshers week and meeting up with old friends. To have them all descend on Leeds at once is the recipe for an almighty spike and heaven help the students and the unis when they get the blame for Leeds’s first football game in the Premier League to be behind closed doors and when all the pubs get closed again. We suggest that the council and the universities get together, be creative and come up with an intelligent plan.

Open Letter to All Leeds Universities

Open letter to All Leeds Universities

As one university spokesperson wrote to us, indeed your students are not solely responsible for the situation. In many ways the students are just victims, collateral damage in a system, an infrastructure which which has evolved, consisting of entitled students and their entitled parents, lazy and unscrupulous landlords and ladies, and the criminal drug pushers who work for themselves at the expense of us all. (And of course it isn’t all landlords/ladies, it isn’t all students, but it is all druggies.) Let us also add in a council and a police force who either genuinely don’t realise just how bad the situation has become, or don’t have the will or the capacity to change it.

However, as far the students are concerned, they may not be solely your students, and it is not all students, but the party-goers are all students. And the students are only here because the universities are here. And this gives the unis both the responsibility and ability to do something about the situation.

Presently there are two distinct types of party-type antisocial behaviour. The raves such as the one that happened on Woodhouse Moor were not organised by students and were mostly locals and nearly all from other areas of Leeds. But in the late afternoon the organisers were conspicuously walking round the back streets round our way so presumably they were looking for students to invite. And students’ parents and the universities should be really worried about this.

 Only five years ago my daughter came back from work at the pub to find that someone had climbed the tree in our front garden and then dropped onto the pavement where she then died. Only later did we discover that she been persuaded to take drugs for the first time and, the very next day, was going away to university to do a post-grad course. How tragic this was was brought home when her parents came up from her hometown to see where she died and meet the person who found her. As they stood in the garden looking at the tree and described the life she had been about to lead we just felt that their daughter was our daughter or sister.

But this letter is not just about noise, parties drugs and alcohol abuse. Anti-social behaviour also includes incompetent  waste management. Students either don’t care or don’t know how to recycle and, for example, don’t realise or care that you can’t, in Leeds, put glass into a green bin, and that you should not leave bins out on the pavement. Also, on Leaving Day just wheeling mattresses and sofas out onto the street for someone else to deal with is the disgusting height [or depth] of anti-social behaviour.

Hyde Park Road Leeds

And then  there are few things more insensitive than parking in front of a neighbour’s drive. Obviously the council hasn’t helped by painting white parking lines down some streets (eg Moorland Avenue), but you would think that the presence of a parking area, especially if there is a vehicle in it would be a giveaway. The implications for anyone who has to drive to work [and arrive on time] are frightening.

In general the graffiti and the fly-tipping (apart from the aforementioned mattresses) aren’t directly the students’ fault, but by treating the neighbourhood badly you invite others to regarding it as a dumping ground.

Local residents who live here all round keep the area afloat - just. We keep the shops, the takeaways and the pubs (what’s left of them] ticking over. Without us the area would die altogether. So when the two entitled parents told one particular resident on two separate occasions within one week in July 2020 that she living in the wrong area, said parents should realise that without us, their children would not last the distance.

 

"Cost of Work on Centre Wouldn't be Millions"

YEP Letters: July 24

Published on the 24 July
2013
09:48

Published 24/07/2013 09:48

 

Like many of us who have fought to save the West Park Centre, I was disgusted by Coun Lewis’s letter of July 2 – both in what I felt was its disingenuous, misleading content and its glib, patronising tone.

If Coun Lewis wishes to talk about facts, perhaps we should start with the “millions” of pounds he claims would be needed to keep the centre open to accommodate the users (2,000 of them per week – another fact) who have been displaced. In 2009, an extremely detailed survey of the building was carried out by Leeds City Council which found that a comprehensive modernisation and refurb of the building would cost £2.2m.
The cost of the necessary works to keep the building safe and operational? A far more modest £199k. Meanwhile, Grafton Learning Centre in Little London has just had very similar works done at a cost of less than £60k!
The figures used to support the disgraceful decision to close the centre were produced this year, at LCC Asset Management’s request, by a “design consultancy” called Arup – not a construction firm, not a firm of electricians, not a firm of gas/water fitters.
The ludicrous figure of £4.2 million to refurbish the building is not a quote – it is a wild estimate (including costings for work that has already been done) from a firm whose previous projects include the Gherkin, the HS1 rail link, the London Eye, Angel of the North and Sydney Opera House. Not one real quote has been obtained for work on West Park since its closure last year, and Arup’s reports have meanwhile cost the taxpayers of Leeds around £8,000. Shame on Coun Lewis, shame on those who prevaricated for years on the building’s fate, and shame on the barbarians in Leeds City Council Asset Management who have so casually run down and destroyed one of the city’s biggest assets.
Name and address supplied

The West Park Centre in The YEP again: Centred Valued Near and Far

Letter: Centre valued near and far

Published on the 24 June
2013
13:48

Published 24/06/2013 13:48

                                                    

Regarding West Park Centre. When Corporate Services/Asset Management [and the very name does not suggest public accountability] decides to ignore public need and public opinion, I ask myself who is running this city – a couple of back room boys and girls, or our elected representatives?

And this is the question I put at the Local Council Area Committee at the Cardigan Centre last December, as one councillor after another spoke in the West Park Centre’s defence.
Each councillor spoke in favour of retention, repair and re-opening.
Each one got it; they got that the charities that are our top orchestras and choruses and top Special Needs music organisations are rather more than nice little extras added to the riches of the Leeds cultural scene.
The West Park Centre is not a local community centre, although many of its much valued volunteers were/are local.
It is an inclusive arts centre; it is a city-wide, and at times Yorkshire-wide, and it is situated very conveniently close to Leeds ring road within the safe spitting distance of a parade of shops who open from early morning till late at night.
Recently one organisation [YAMSEN: SpeciallyMusic] has become rather more than Yorkshire wide.
In May a group of five masters degree students of Music education in Seoul National University in Korea emailed to request a meeting with us, and especially “ hoping to see multi sensory classroom, Rehearsal Room, studio and the Main Hall.” They wrote they are “trying to adapt UK’s education system of SEN and learning strategy of ArtForms & YAMSEN to Korean special music ed [ucation]”
So, if the Executive Board decides on Wednesday to accept the recommendations of a small group of unelected officials, whose job it is to manage assets, and who has failed dismally, over the space of seven months, to place satisfactorily several massive users of the centre, it won’t be just the people of Leeds that they let down.
Victoria Jaquiss FRSA