A found Leeds litany, raw notes from an afternoon walk

Way back in June, as part of Andrew Wilson’s wonderful HannaH Festival, a group of citizens fanned out from Wharf Street Chambers into the summer drizzle clutching maps to four quarters of our city. We briefed participants to look for evidence of Leeds’ past, present and future. On returning to base we shared what everyone had found as photos and sticky notes spread out in a giant timeline on the wall.

As organiser, I committed to take the collective findings and weave them together into some kind of essay, as part of the Stories in their place series that emerges sporadically from this blog. Now it is winter, nearly six months to the day since our walk, and all I have are these damned PostIts. The promised essay will follow, with grand sweeping themes. But not yet.

So by way of a down payment I offer you the raw notes, transcribed from the PostIts and ordered roughly as we stuck them on the wall at Wharf Street.

Like a medieval bestiary, ontography can take the form of a compendium, a record of things juxtaposed to demonstrate their overlap and imply interaction through collocation. The simplest approach to such recording is the list, a group of items loosely joined not by logic or power or use but by the gentle knot of the comma. Ontography is an aesthetic set theory, in which a particular configuration is celebrated merely on the basis of its existence. — Ian Bogost, Alien Phenomenology, or What It’s Like to Be a Thing

Here is the list, a found Leeds litany. Make of it what you will.

• East Bar stone outside the Minster
• Kirkgate oldest street in Leeds
• Failing since Briggate was built
• Black Prince statue – political message
• Public art – Victorian and Current
• First White Cloth Hall
• Railway through the end of the 2nd White Cloth Hall
• Hunslet industrial history
• Victorian attention to detail
• Doors big for big cargo
• Foundation of Leeds United
• Bricked up windows and doors
• Leeds brick
• Bricks made locally
• Old Dock
• Printworks
• 1990s riverside development
• Back alleys
• Narrow lanes
• Clarence Dock
• The Armouries
• A long way from anywhere
• Failed shopping centre
• How many people actually live here
• Crown Hotel and blue building
• Development Corporation
• De-industrialisation
• Shiny buildings with social problems
• Hotel with unexpected consequences
• Market – Traditional shopping vs Trinity
• A city of shopping
• Poundland, Poundworld, Poundstretcher
• Pile of bricks that was Tetley’s
• Tetley’s now a car park
• Green spaces
• Parasitic balconies in the canal
• Stagnant lagoon
• Seedy places of innovation
• Modern sheds in compounds
• Locks on Millenium Bridge
• Asda grocery collection point
• Plans for a park
• Digital agency in an old industrial building
• The new college
• Salem Church of big data
• Cheap spaces – Berlinification
• Bins and recycling
• Hipster urban regeneration
• Corn Exchange and building next door – tiling
• Retro – what is old
• Trinity Church – arts centre
• Basinghall Street – service street

Thanks to all the walkshoppers, whose names can be found on the Eventbrite page.