Higher Coach Road History

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On Saturday 22nd September, in conjunction with our Green Route tour of Roberts Park and the Higher Coach Road estate, we held a community-facing event aimed at generating further discussion among residents of the estate about the past, present and potential futures of this riverside housing development.

The event was themed as “the Higher Coach Road beach party” – playfully referring to the “sandy bank” that older residents recall kids playing on in the estate’s early years before the footbridge towards Hirst Lock was built in 1962.

 

A small collection of “beach huts” was erected at the bottom of Bowland Avenue, facing the river (we wanted to put them on the green flood plain area, but it was a bit too boggy that day), and representatives from Bradford Council, the Environment Agency, and the Aire Rivers Trust were on hand in the huts to answer residents’ questions and register their concerns. There were also kids’ activities (including a bouncy castle, craft activities, etc.), a fish-and-chip stall, and a community mapper working with residents to explore how they see the area and what they might like to see in future…

A number of residents wanted to argue for a “Denso’s”-style wetland nature reserve being established on the habitually boggy green space between the river and houses. This might be a good idea both from a ‘biodiversity’ point of view (there’d be still more wildlife for residents to appreciate) and a ‘flood storage’ point of view (wetlands hold water better rather than allowing it simply to run off towards the already over-full river in high water conditions). On the other hand, though, some residents were concerned that making a wet area still wetter, in close proximity to housing, might be a safety concern for families with children etc. This debate about possible futures was lively and (as you can see) well-illustrated!

Yet another of the “beach huts” was designated as the Higher Coach Road History Hut, and featured exhibits showing old plans for the area, from the West Yorkshire Archive Service, and a summary of what we’ve learned about the estate’s history from (a) the archive and (b) the memories of longer-term residents. In response to various requests to make this material avaialable, the key points from this historical work are re-presented below…

1. Shipley, Baildon or Saltaire?

The Coach Road estates were built in the 1950s by Shipley Urban District Council, on Baildon land, that had been purchased from Salts of Saltaire Ltd.  During the 1860s, pioneering mill owner Titus Salt had bought up huge tracts of land on the north side of the Aire, but apart from establishing Roberts Park, and laying down Coach Road (which led to his sons’ houses at Milner Field, to the west, and Ferniehurst, to the east), he did little with it.

The inheritors of Salts Mill still owned all this land until after World War II.  The company even drew up unrealised plans for a huge housing estate, to be known as the “Milner Field Estate”: this would have involved chopping down most of the trees in Hirst Wood, Shipley Glen, etc., in order to build on the cleared land. However, the imagined scheme never got the go-ahead.

In the period immediately following World War II, the Labour government created the modern welfare state: Aneurin ‘Nye’ Bevan, as Minister for Health, was the architect of the NHS, but he also laid the foundations for the creation of local council housing estates (as opposed to privately owned housing estates, like the one Salts had planned).  In 1952, responding to the West Riding County Planning Department’s call for new council housing in the Shipley area, Shipley Urban District Council announced its intention to buy and build on the plots of riverside land on either side of Roberts Park.

The planned new housing was intended primarily for residents displaced by the demolition of “slum” housing in Shipley town centre, Windhill, and other local areas. Shipley’s plans included building in three distinct areas. Zone 1 was the area east of Roberts Park, between Thompson Lane to the north and Coach Road to the south. Zone 2, the largest section, was the area to the west of Roberts Park, now known as the Higher Coach Road estate. Zone 3, the smallest section, was the area to the south of Coach Road on the east of the park (i.e. the housing on Tennis Way and Aire Way).

2. Baildon Council opposes the estate

All of the land in question lay within Baildon parish, and Baildon Urban District Council objected to Shipley’s plans on multiple grounds — particularly the plan to build in the previously undeveloped Higher Coach Road area. According to a June 1952 summary report from the Ministry of Local Government and Housing (in London),  Baildon Urban District Council objected to Shipley building on this land for the following reasons (quoted verbatim from the document):

  1. That the scheme is extravagant.
  2. That the [road] bridge at Salts Mill would have to be reconstructed.
  3. That the amenities of the Coach Road area, including Shipley Glen, would be destroyed.
  4. That the site is water-logged.
  5. That there is suitable alternative land in Shipley for the development in question.

Shipley successfully argued against these objections, and the Minister permitted development to go ahead, provided the natural amenities of this green-belt area were respected (see 4 below). However, a memo from the West Riding County Planning Department dated December 1951 suggests that Baildon’s real objection to the development was more fundamental:

“Baildon Council objected to the definition of land in Coach Road district for residential use, as the implication was that any large scale development would be to re-house population at present resident in Shipley.”

In other words: Baildon did not want residents from Shipley’s so-called “slum” housing living on Baildon land! However, once the scheme was approved by the Minister, Baildon began to argue for many more houses to be crammed into this area. Why? Apparently so as to head off Shipley’s stated intention of buying more Baildon land, this time in the West Lane area. This would have placed council housing much closer to the centre of Upper Baildon. Baildon Council made clear that they were hoping “that a more spacious type of development would take place [in this area] than that associated with a Council Housing Estate.” But this meant them advocating less-than-spacious developments in the Coach Road area, cramming in as many people as possible, so as to ensure that Shipley did not need more space up the hill.

3. Salts wrangling with Shipley…

Salts of Saltaire Ltd. were initially reluctant to sell their riverside land to Shipley Council, apparently because they were hoping to get a better price than the one being offered. To maximise the perceived value of the land sale, the company attempted to package in the Victoria Road Bridge at Saltaire. Salts argued that the housing estates would necessarily need road access across the river at Victoria Road. They also hoped that Shipley Council would take responsibility for fixing the bridge, which had been damaged during the war (tanks made at Butterfields in Shipley had repeatedly been driven across it to be tested on Baildon Moor, destabilising the 19th Century structure). Shipley commissioned a survey report which established that the bridge “was incapable of being made good at a reasonable expense.” Understandably, they refused to buy it, and so it was at this point that talk began of a new footbridge being built into Roberts Park (i.e. the current one). The road bridge was later demolished.

With Salts continued to drag their heels about a sale, Shipley applied to central government for a Compulsory Purchase Order. This would have forced Salts to sell the land at the District Surveyor’s valuation of just £5,800, which was significantly below what Shipley was offering! (The documentary evidence suggests that the surveyor’s office co-operated with the Council on this point…) Caught in a pincer movement, Salts decided to sell before the CPO could be enforced – and thus stated that they “could not accede to the request [from Baildon Council] that they should oppose the Development Plan.”

To avoid maximise the sale proceeds, Salts now proposed to sell off Shipley Glen and other wooded areas along with the land Shipley wanted for housing estates. Shipley agreed to the package, and bought the whole lot for £8,160.

4. Respecting the Natural Environment

In 1952, when the Minister for Local Government approved Shipley’s application to build on the riverside land (see 2 above), he specified there should be “no residential development carried out between Coach Road and the base of the wooded hills on the more westerly side.” This was a concession to Baildon’s stated concerns about protecting the “natural amenities” of this greenbelt land, and it forced a change of plans by Shipley. Their original lay-out for the planned Higher Coach Road estate involved building on Trench Meadow — land now preserved as a Site of Special Scientific Interest (so the Minister seems to have been well advised!).

To their credit, rather than simply tweaking the existing layout plan, Shipley went back to the drawing board – and sought the advice of the Housing Ministry’s Regional Architect, Mr. Williams (based in Leeds). In September 1953, following this consultation, Shipley unveiled a new layout – the one eventually adopted – which consciously sought to be sympathetic to “the pleasant rural atmosphere of the area.” So for example, the plan was to preserve open green space between the fronts of houses, rather than having the estate dominated by tarmac. Instead, car access was to be tucked away almost invisibly onto service roads leading to back doors.

As the Council’s planners noted, “the amended lay-out takes a rather novel form” – so novel, in fact, that “there are, unfortunately, no local examples of this type of development which [council] members could inspect” (in order to form their own judgement). And yet, stated the same document, “It will be noted that a very pleasing, spacious type of development is obtained which will go a long way towards minimising any harmful effect of housing development on the amenities of this particular area.” For those concerned about budgeting, it was noted that less road-building also meant “a reduction in roadwork costs per house.”

The down side was that, “inevitably there will be a reduction in density of accommodation”. That is, the carefully spaced, grassy layout at Higher Coach Road would mean that the numbers of houses to be built was considerably less than was being demanded by both West Riding Planning Department and Baildon Council (see above). However, given the role played by the Regional Architect of the Ministry of Housing in the revised scheme, there was little point in objections being put to the Ministry…

Shipley’s new commitment to blending their housing plans in with the natural environment consciously resisted the “stack ‘em high, pack ‘em deep” thinking that was common in much council housing planning in the 1950s — as was typified by building high-rise blocks of flats in other areas. Today, in 2012, many of those flats have long since been knocked down or blown up, but in the Coach Road area some of the residents who moved in during the 1950s are still living there. They have never wanted to leave this well-designed estate.

5. Building on Marshland

The land on which the Higher Coach Road estate was built is composed of soft, alluvial soil (silt deposited by the river over centuries). From the start, it was recognised that these were “Abnormal Site Conditions” for building on. The land nearest the River Aire, most prone to flooding, was left free from development, but even the higher ground was a problem. As a Shipley Council memo from 1952 noted, “surface water is liable to cause difficulty during construction and there are a number of surface springs.”

Extensive earthworks were required in order to drain the land, and to even out the undulating hills of alluvial soil. Some of the ground was flattened down, and other parts built up in order to create the largely even ground at the top of the flood embankment that we see today. Interestingly, the earthworks contract with the contractors, L.J. McCarthy, specified that they would be paid by the ton for shifting and removing soil and rock, but exempted loose boulders of “less than 3 cubic feet in size”. These were a common feature of the area: smooth, round boulders littered the area, and had probably been left behind by the movement of the glacier that had made its way down the Aire Valley during the last ice age! Since these boulders were already loose rock, Shipley saw no need to pay the contractors to move them, but as a result, the first residents moving onto the estate found them still littering the green areas! Some got buried, others did eventually have to be broken up and removed.

The houses built on this soft land had no basements. Concrete piles were driven into the ground as corner supports, but the weight of the houses had to be distributed across their surface area so as to minimise the risk of them tilting (the Leaning Tower of Pisa leans because it concentrates too much weight on soft, alluvial ground!). The floors of the houses are made of concrete slabs, or “rafts” – about 4 inches thick – which simply sit on a prepared bed of hardcore, and are topped by a layer of asphalt/bitumen (visible under people’s carpets!). The raft design helps spread out the weight of the houses, allowing them – in effect – to “float” on the soft surface of the land.

The houses on the Higher Coach Road estate were built by Shipley Direct Labour Force – a multi-skilled task force put together by the Council – in the years between 1956 and 1962. According to archival records, the total building costs came to £386, 515.

6.   When is a garden not a garden?

The original design of the estate made no provision for front gardens. Residents were to have back yard or garden spaces, but between the fronts of the houses there was to be open, communal green space (the grass was originally kept long, as a kind of meadowland, in keeping with the previous character of the area). From the outset, Shipley Council was aware that “some adjustment in outlook and living habits on the part of tenants will be called for” in order for this sharing of communal spaces to work in practice. It appears, however, that nobody thought to explain this to the new tenants!

In 1956, very first new residents on the estate moved in, on Park Way and Windermere Avenue, at the east end (the rest of the streets were still to be built). And by September of that year, the tenants had already begun requesting permission to erect fences separating their “front gardens” from the estate’s footpaths. This was because “sheep who have been used to grazing on this ground still wander over the gardens,” and were eating any plants and flowers sown in them.

Shipley Council responded by insisting that planting out should be reserved for people’s back gardens: “the houses facing greenswards should not have fences or hedges which would spoil the open aspect intended to be achieved.” In short, there were no front gardens: the areas between the houses and the footpaths were intended to be treated simply as grass verges, consistent with the central meadow spaces. At the same time, though, the Council had to acknowledge that some of the new residents had “put a considerable amount of work into their gardens” (even though they weren’t supposed to be gardens…).

The Council attempted to solve the problem by penalising the local farmers who were still allowing sheep to graze on the estate. They wrote to farmer J.H. Denby, for example, to inform him that  “complaints are now received at the Town Hall on an almost daily basis”, and that “whatever steps your shepherd informs you he is taking appear to be almost entirely ineffective.” Despite these efforts, though, complaints about sheep and horses straying onto the estate continued for over a decade! This letter, for instance, dates from 1967:

To Mr. J. Bell, Hope Farm, Baildon.

Dear Sir,

I understand that sheep owned by you are straying onto the Council’s land adjoining the Higher Coach Road Housing Estate and grazing there. I shall be glad if you will ensure that the trespass will cease immediately.

Yours faithfully,

Clerk & Solicitor, Shipley Urban District Council.

Needless to say, with the grazing continuing to be a problem, residents on the estate continued to take matters into their own hands with respect to fencing off their “verges” as gardens. Today, it is difficult to imagine that these front garden areas were ever intended to be anything else!

***

Well, that’s it for now, on our trip through Higher Coach Road’s early history as an estate. We hope you’ll agree that it provides an intriguing insight into the various debates around urban planning in the 1950s and 60s… Today, the estate sits across the river from what is  now a World Heritage Site (Saltaire), and indeed within the WHS buffer zone restricting new development. What if we were to make a case that this area, too, is worthy of notice as part of the local heritage narrative…?


 

Feedback

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Thanks to everyone who wrote in with responses to our public performances on the weekend of September 21st-23rd. In addition to the following comments, you can also read a very interesting write-up on the highly regarded Culture Vulture arts blog: just click here to go to the review.

* * *

Thank you for a wonderful experience on Friday evening on the Green, Red and Blue routes.  Wonderful stories, magical theatrical experience, lovely surprises, parts of Shipley I have not explored in 30 years.  Please thank everyone concerned.

–  Mervyn Flecknoe, Baildon.

My wife and I attended all your events on Friday 21 September.  It was the best walking theatre experience we have ever had; it was one of the best  dramatic performances we have ever seen. It was deeply and accurately researched; it  involved and valued real people, built community, did not duck big issues, dealt even-handedly with tricky questions like the Saltaire Hydro;  and it was fun. Please put it on again. . . . Thankyou for an extraordinary and uplifting  experience.

– John and Ruth Anderson,  Baildon .

A great thank you to your team for making Saturday 22nd of September such an entertaining and memorable day. Not knowing what to expect when we first met up for the Green Route walk, we were quickly into the ‘flow’ of it, had a laugh, some had a little cry, learnt lots of fascinating things about the places we usually just walk by and generally had fun. I think this would be such a great lesson for local schools, I hope somehow some funding could be found so that it can be repeated. The Junior Blue Route was quite different but was of equal enjoyment to us as a family, I think we all could have a quite easily have sailed on to Skipton, although I am not sure whether we would be there yet.

– Richard Sabey, Saltaire

Many thanks to the whole team for a very entertaining and informative couple of days.  We have lived in Shipley and Lower Baildon for 19 of the last 30 years (plus many times passing through on our floating home) but were surprised by the amount we learned about our locality.

– Dave & Pam, Lower Baildon

I went to two of the performances (Green and Red routes) of Multi-Story Water last Saturday. I just want to say how much I and my friends enjoyed them. The actors were brilliant, the script was clever and interesting and although we all live locally, we learnt new information and, on the route in Shipley, even walked where we’d never been before. It certainly raised my awareness of water around us and I have often thought about our local river and the flood areas during this week of almost constant rain! A great idea and a lovely bunch of actors and stewards! Thankyou all of you!

– Libby Ray

I just wanted to take time to say “thank you” – what a terrific experience! I felt the whole thing was really well crafted and acted; I was engaged throughout. I’m only sorry that time prevented me from undertaking the other two tours (I was on the Green tour yesterday). I learnt so much about Roberts Park and the estate I didn’t know- and I’ve been living here 25 years! Many thanks again to all concerned.

– Jonathan Hall

I would just like to tell you that we really enjoyed our two walks yesterday, they were informative, interesting, funny and moving. The actors were very good, the old P.O.W. from Burma moved us to tears. The script was well researched and interesting. Thanks to everyone.

– Annette Dent

My friend Judy and I thoroughly enjoyed Sunday’s 12:00 Blue Route barge experience. Thanks again!

– Barbara Walker, Thackley

I’m writing, a little late, to thank you for the MSW Green Route. I went to the show on Friday afternoon and thoroughly enjoyed myself. I particularly enjoyed the stories of some of the residents we “met”. Thankyou for telling the story as a whole world view of heritage and the environment. Congratulations to the actors!

  – Neill Morrison, Bradford Council

 

Hydro #2

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So, last weekend saw our Multi-Story Water performances happen around and about Shipley and Saltaire. Thankfully, the weather held out for us – with glorious sunshine on the Saturday, and only drizzle on the Sunday afternoon… A few hours later, the north of England was hit by what the Met Office has called “the worst September storms for 30 years”. So I guess you could say we got lucky! And the feedback on the weekend has mostly been very positive (more on that in a subsequent post).

Predictably enough, our scene discussing plans for the hydro-electric screw on Saltaire weir – at the outset of our Green Route walk – proved the most controversial part of what we presented. Indeed Rob Martin, chair of the Saltaire Village Society, was prompted to write to the Telegraph and Argus with the following letter (original link is here):

SIR – It was a pleasure to take part in Multi-Story Water over the last weekend in Saltaire. The boat ride with singing by Eddie Lawler and two walks along the River Aire up and downstream from Saltaire provided lots of information in an entertaining way. Some information, however, was not correct. At one point, the audience stood on a slope in Roberts Park at the site of a proposed turbine house for a hydro power scheme. We were told that once installed it wouldn’t be noticeable. In fact, the slope with four mature trees on which we were standing would become the flat roof of the turbine house, with a railing to stop us falling off. The audience was also told that local people are against generating hydro power from that weir. This is untrue. Saltaire Village Society opposes siting a scheme on the Roberts Park side, but advocates it for the opposite bank, where water power once drove large water wheels for Dixons Mill (where James Roberts built the New Mill).

Rob Martin, chairman, Saltaire Village Society, c/o Albert Road, Saltaire

Unfortunately, however, Rob is himself guilty of misinformation here, not least the claim that New Mill was built by James Roberts. (Titus Salt constructed it in 1868.) The claims he makes about our performance, moreover, are simply untrue. As I have noted in a response to the T&A (remains to be seen whether they publish it), “the performance did not, in fact, make either of the claims that Mr. Martin suggests. He writes: ‘At one point, the audience stood on a slope in Roberts Park at the site of a proposed turbine house for a hydro power scheme. We were told that once installed it wouldn’t be noticeable.’ Nothing of the sort was said. We stated that ‘some have argued that the hydro installation will spoil the view’, but also that ‘the scheme is designed to enhance the visitor experience’ (which it could hardly do if it wasn’t noticeable!). Secondly, Mr. Martin claims that ‘the audience was also told that local people are against generating hydro power from that weir’. Plainly this is not the case, not least because many local people are in total support of the scheme. Our script stated simply: ‘some have argued that this modern installation is inappropriate in a Victorian heritage site’ – a statement which neither side of the argument could dispute!”

In the interests of full disclosure, I am pasting in, below, the whole script for this section of the performance. However, in this fuller blog-post format, I also just want to query Rob’s suggestion that “the slope with four mature trees on which we were standing would become the flat roof of the turbine house.” The particular spot we were standing on, just downhill of the footpath leading to the bridge, clearly remains – in the architect’s drawings of the scheme – a piece of grassy slope with trees:

Our scene was placed to the left of this image, on the slope just behind where the lone figure stands at the railings. Actress Lynsey Jones gestured towards the area next to the weir where the turbine house would stand, according to the plans, and pointed out that “currently there’s just a lot of overgrowth” along that stretch of the river’s edge (again, a point which is difficult to dispute). In short, unless the plans for the scheme have been radically revised since the July 5th public consultation at which this and other images were displayed, I would defend the accuracy of our script. It is perfectly reasonable to disagree with our position on the hydro scheme (it’s fair to say that the performance struck a position broadly in favour the proposals), or to dislike the playfully theatrical tone in which we presented the scene (which, I can now see, could be considered insensitive to the very real pain that the arguments have caused for some in the Saltaire area). But that does not mean that anything we said was, per se, untrue.

OK, honour defended, here’s the script section I promised. Judge for yourself:

LIONEL: Time flows on…

ALISTAIR: …metaphorically, like a river. But also cyclically, like a wheel!

DOROTHY:  Now water power is making a comeback here…

LIONEL: In the form of a hydro-electric power generator…

DOROTHY:  An Archimedes screw!

DOROTHY:  Here on Saltaire weir…

LIONEL:  Here on the Roberts Park side, because Bradford Council owns the park –

ALISTAIR:  And it’s Bradford Council that’s proposing a screw in the river.

DOROTHY:  Now, this is proving to be quite a controversial. Some have argued that the hydro installation will spoil the view…  although if you look at the designs, the placement would be here, where currently there’s just a lot of overgrowth…  (pointing it out)

ALISTAIR: You see, the scheme is designed to enhance the visitor experience.

LIONEL: Some have argued that this modern installation is inappropriate in a Victorian Heritage Site…

ALISTAIR:  In that case, so is the weir. Take it down!

DOROTHY:  (ignoring him) … but the CWHPHACIEESS proposes a more embracing, encompassing understanding of heritage.

LIONEL: Not frozen over, but flowing on into the future.

[There then followed a reproduction of sections from an interview with Neill Morrison, of Bradford Council. Admittedly, it was less than “even-handed” to include Neill’s position without presenting a counter-argument, but this part of the script is more interested in the wider “climate change” argument than the hydro scheme per se…]

REPORTER: According to Bradford Council, the future could be stormy.

SIGNAGE 1: BE PREPARED TO TAKE ACTION!

REPORTER:  Said the signage at the recent public consultation about the proposed hydro installation.

SIGNAGE 2:  CLIMATE CHANGE IS HAPPENING!

SIGNAGE 1:  ARE YOU READY FOR CLIMATE CHANGE?

SIGNAGE 2:  The weather in Bradford is changing. We must adapt our property, communities, and lifestyles for more extremes of weather, such as..

SIGNAGE 1: frequent floods

SIGNAGE 2: severe winds

SIGNAGE 1: heavy snowfalls

SIGNAGE 2: heatwaves

SIGNAGE 1: droughts.

(beat)

REPORTER: (to herself)  Crikey!  (beat – then, to the public…) We spoke to Neil Morrissey.

NEILL: Morrison,

REPORTER:  Neill Morrison…

NEILL: I get that all the time.

REPORTER: Energy Management Officer for Bradford Council…

NEILL:  You look at how the weather’s changed over the last thirty years… we’re getting more extreme weather, more often. Every year it’s the wettest June or the driest January … This year we’ve had this weird situation where the rivers were really dry in March and April, when they should  be stonking – and then in June when they should be at base flow and nothing spare, it was pumping out here for weeks… I kayak for a hobby so I notice it. And down in Calderdale, they had the worst flooding in recorded history…

REPORTER: But is it Bradford’s responsibility to solve climate change?

NEILL: (a small sigh) It’s everyone’s responsibility to solve climate change.  There is no, ‘whose responsibility is it?’ That’s part of the problem, that’s why stuff doesn’t get done – everyone’s blaming someone else.  You can’t use that as an excuse any more. You have to – do something!

REPORTER: But surely something like this hydro is just a drop in the ocean of what’s needed.

NEILL: Of course. But you cannot have one thing that will fix the situation. You’ve got to have lots of schemes, lots of technologies, and they’ve got to complement each other.  So you start by looking at what we can do in this district – and at the assets we have. We have waste, which we’re working on… we have wind, but frankly the argument over wind will make this look like a storm in a teacup. Imagine what the Bronte Society would say if we said “oh we want to put wind turbines on Top Withens.” You cannot blend them in! But we think we can blend this in…  With hydro, there’s a chance here. It’s about making the best of what you’ve got.

[extract ends]

Anyway, I hope that puts the record straight. But perhaps, considered in the great scheme of things, this is all just (as Neill put it) a “storm in a teacup”… We have bigger storms to worry about.

 

Hydro!

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The hottest water issue in Saltaire at present (sorry, no pun intended) is Bradford Council’s proposal to install a hydro-electric power generator — an Archimedes screw – on the River Aire at Saltaire weir. The controversy raging is around the fact that the site proposed is within the grounds of Roberts Park, which Bradford Council owns, but which it is by no means free to do with as it wishes. The argument against the installation can be simply summarised as follows: “the project changes the use of a recreational park space, and has no place in a protected park, in a protected conservation area, in a protected World Heritage Site.”

Those words appear about half-way through a document titled “Reasons to be Doubtful”, which has been carefully prepared by “a group of concerned villagers” (no author is identified). The latest, September version of this document (it continues to evolve as more information becomes available) was the key persuading factor in the decision last week by the Saltaire Village Society to come out in opposition to the proposals. (See news report here.) A copy was provided to me by Rob Martin, chair of the SVS, and also coincidentally one of the performers in our Blue Route canal tour. His fellow performer on the boat will be Eddie Lawler, who remains in favour of the hydro proposals — just one small indication of the way that this plan has divided the local community. It’s a very sensitive issue, with strong arguments on both sides.

So what’s the argument in favour? At a public consultation about the proposals at Saltaire’s URC Church on July 5th this year, the signage on the way into the church’s basement exhibition space made the Council’s case pretty unambiguous:

Technically, of course, building a renewable energy plant constitutes “mitigation” of climate change rather than “adaptation” to it. That is, it helps reduce carbon emissions (all other things being equal), but does nothing to prepare us for adverse or extreme weather… Most scientists are now in little doubt that we need to be doing both, so the hydro plan is part of Bradford’s response those uncomfortable realities – and at least it is doing something! The Council’s main persuasion tactic seems to be to appeal to the green sensibilities of the local population: Shipley ward elects the only Green councillors on Bradford Council, after all (even if the MP, Philip Davies, is a climate change sceptic!).

Presumably we could add “Support renewable energy schemes in your area” to the bottom of that list… But what the Council have not done very clearly here is link this notion of global change, global responsibility, to the particularities of a local place. And it’s often difficult for people to see what difference small, local changes will make to the big, global picture (even though a lot of small changes might add up to a big one!).

It seems to me that the Council could have been much more explicit about admitting that the choice of Saltaire weir for this hydro scheme is as much a symbolic one as a practical one — that it’s a showcase scheme designed to draw public attention to the wider need for a switch to renewable energy. The objections to the scheme in the “Reasons to be Doubtful” document mostly relate to the inappropriateness of placing a power plant in a recreational park: indeed the authors make the point that such usage may contravene the terms of the deed of gift by which the Roberts family gave the park to the City in the 1920s. But if the hydro is constructed and displayed in such a way as to add to the interest value of the park for visitors, then the installation would presumably be enhancing the park’s “recreational and amenity value” rather than detracting from it. And clearly that is the intention here… You only have to look at the aesthetically rendered visions of the hydro installation on display at the July 5th consultation…

This diagram image, and its keenness to interpret and explain, seems to reflect a key aspect of the hydro plan — i.e. that it should serve as a pleasantly-designed educative exhibit, as well as a working power generator. None of this seems to me inherently objectionable in a conservation area or World Heritage Site, especially given that the return to “water power” signalled by the hydro installation also symbolises a cyclical return to the site’s own history. The weir is here in the first place because it once served a water mill – Dixons Mill – that stood on the southern bank before Salts.

In point of fact, even the protest lobby against the scheme seems to be aware that the hydro installation might add to the amenity and visitor value of the park. How else to explain the last point on the placard below? (sited at the ‘picket’ point outside the July consultation)

That final point suggests that increased traffic congestion might result from the added ‘attraction’ value of the showpiece hydro installation. And yet at the same time, there’s the assumption that it will be a burden (“Saltaire bears the brunt”) and an eyesore (obscuring views). The argument is somewhat self-contradictory, and perhaps somebody pointed this out to the ‘No’ campaign: it’s telling that the “traffic” objection is nowhere apparent in the September “Reasons to be Doubtful” document.

I have to say that I’m not convinced, either, about the suggestion that ‘iconic’ views will be spoiled by the installation: if you go down and look a the proposed site at present, the views from it are already partially obscured by self-seeding riverside foliage growing out the banking. Purely in aesthetic terms, the designs for the installation would appear to be an improvement, visually. The “Reasons to be Doubtful” document does mention that pulling out trees (presumably these ones) is an environmental no-no. Yet a much more substantial swathe of riverside greenery was pulled up during the Lottery-funded improvements to the park only a few years ago – precisely in order to clear the views from the cricket pitch to the bridge, Boathouse and Salts Mill…

But I’m digressing. Let’s return to the key argument. If one accepts the proposition (and plenty of people don’t!) that a hydro of this sort is a kind of showcase exhibit, with a symbolic and educative value beyond its purely practical, energy-producing function, then most of the objections in the “Reasons to be Doubtful” document fade away pretty quickly. “There is only a modest green gain.” Well yes, nobody ever said water could be harnessed to enormously powerful effect (there’s a reason we once switched to steam mills from water mills!). The point is not that this one hydro would generate huge amounts of energy, but that many similar, small-scale schemes up and down our river catchments (coupled with other schemes to create power from wind, waves, waste, etc.) might start to make a difference to our fossil-fuel dependency. “This scheme represents poor value for money.” Perhaps, but by the “Reasons…” document’s own reckoning, the additional cost in comparison with – say – the hydro at Hirst Mill being proposed by Sustainable Saltaire, is mostly caused by the need to make the installation appropriately presentable in a protected heritage context. Again, that price might well be worth paying for the public showcase value. And besides, Bradford Council’s figures, even at the conservative end, indicate that this hydro would pay for itself within a decade or so.

The “Reasons to be Doubtful” document does, however, ask a few searching questions about the green credentials of the scheme. Has anyone calculated what the actual carbon expenditure would be to install the hydro in the first place? Because without such an estimate, we can’t be sure what the net energy savings would really be of such a scheme, as opposed to the gross power generated. Not only that, the document refers to this proposed hydro as a “token gesture”… If it is to have symbolic value as a public exhibit of the virtues of green energy, it needs to be evident that it not tokenistic, but one scheme among many (the showcase scheme among many) that Bradford Council is developing. Otherwise it really would be just window-dressing, or “greenwash”. So there are still questions that need to be answered persuasively by the Council.

And perhaps the most persuasive argument on the “anti-” side is simply that the gestural value of installing such a showcase turbine does not stack up against the potential inconvenience value to the local community… Roberts Park was largely closed off for redevelopment work only a few short years ago, and although nobody disputes that the result is a vast improvement on what was there before, the prospect of part of it being dug up again so soon is understandably off-putting. This is the point that Rob Martin emphasised recently in a piece for the Saltaire Sentinel: “[visitors] would be walking next to a building site for the 14 to 18 months, and it will be even longer before the site resembles anything like the artist’s impression of the finished article. It seems to be very high price for a little bit of sustainable energy.” The counter-argument here, I suppose, is something along the lines of “you don’t make an omelette without cracking a few eggs.” So again, it all comes down to a question of how much you want that omelette.

There are, as I said at the outset, strong arguments on both sides here – although it’s probably clear which side of the debate I favour (and hey, I can afford to: I don’t live in Saltaire and won’t live with the inconvenience of the construction). What I find disturbing in this, however, is the insularity of the way the debate has been framed by some on both sides. The anonymous “concerned villagers” behind the “Reasons to be Doubtful” document seem to have forgotten that they don’t actually live in a “village” entire unto itself, but in a district of Shipley, which is a district of Bradford… But look again at that placard I photographed above – “in our park,” “we” shouldn’t be having to export energy “across Bradford”. Whoever wrote that needs to ask themselves where they get their “own” food, clothing and energy from. Saltaire village is not yet a self-sufficient co-operative. But equally, the Council pitch on July 5th seemed to be pandering to the same presumed, insularised village mentality. Check this out:

I’m not sure I’ve ever seen this “harsh urban edge of Coach Road”. In fact, the Coach Road housing estates, lying on either side of the park, were carefully planned by Shipley Urban District Council, back in the 1950s, precisely in order to preserve the “rural aspect” of the surrounding area (Shipley Glen, Baildon Moor, Hirst Wood…). You can see that especially with the very sensitive design of the Higher Coach Road estate (which will shortly be the subject of another blog posting). Unfortunately, the words “harsh urban edge” seem here to function as code for “those people over there in the housing estates” – wouldn’t it be nice to “screen” them off from “our” park? Well, folks, those people (many of whom are very lovely people, by the way) live in this area too, and the park is on their side of the river.

As park-keeper Martin Bijl is keen to emphasise, the policy of Roberts Park is – quite rightly – to be inclusive and inviting for people from both the north and sound of the river, and indeed from much further afield. In a World Heritage Site, we need to be thinking in terms of a global village.

Rights of Way

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One of the most intriguing questions to explore in the Shipley area, in relation to the river and canal, is the question of public rights of way. Over hundreds of years, certain riverside tracks have developed a status as public footpaths which is now legally enforcible. “Once a highway, always a highway,” is the old adage – according to Bradford Council’s rights of way manager Danny Jackson. Except of course, as Danny’s the first to acknowledge, there are exceptions to that rule. In the 19th Century, after buying a huge swathe of land to the north of the river, all the way from Milner Field to the west, down to Lower Holme in the east, Sir Titus Salt succeeded in having pedestrian access rights moved away from the riverside and onto his new Coach Road. Originally, Coach Road was a private road for vehicles, but a public one for pedestrians. The same went for the Victoria Road bridge at Saltaire: pedestrian access rights were moved to this bridge, and Salt took away the ancient river crossing consisting of stepping stones! In the 1960s, when the road bridge had to be demolished as unfit for vehicular traffic, a new footbridge had to be built by law, in order to restore the public right of way!

Anyway, Sir Titus’s legal footwork explains why, today, there is no official riverside path on the north of the river betwen Baildon Bridge and Hirst Wood. Once you get to Hirst Wood, it reappears: there’s a lovely walk up to Dowley Gap and beyond. But the path running east from Baildon Bridge towards Charlestown (featured in my recent “Lower Holme – picture story” posting), is in a much more precarious state. Though utterly neglected, it’s still there – having survived all the mill demolitions going on around it. But in places the path is very narrow and even treacherous underfoot. Riverside rights have clearly not been at the top of the planning agenda in that area…

Recently, I took a walk with Danny Jackson along a stretch of river path that Bradford Council are paying particular attention to at present. This stretch, also ancient right of way, runs along the South side of the river, between Salt’s Mill and Baildon Bridge. With us on this stroll was my 7-year old daughter Eleanor (seen here outside Saltaire’s gorgeous URC church), who was entrusted withthe task of photographing whatever she thought was worthy of note along the route. The images below are a child’s eye view of the path and its various delights…

Danny and his colleagues have been charged with opening up and improving access along this stretch of path, because it links Saltaire to the recent residential conversion at Victoria Mills. In order to secure planning permission, the Victoria Mills development had to agree, under Section 106 of the Town and Country Planning Act of 1990, to commit funds for these ‘highway’ improvements (it’s all detailed online here). The irony, though, is that there is currently no demand from the residents of Victoria Mills to use this riverside path – and the gate that would provide access to it is normally padlocked for security reasons. Instead, the residents tend to use the nearby canal towpath for walking. So what would really encourage use of this rather run-down path?

We began on the canal towpath outside Salts’ New Mill, since the mill itself prevents any direct access along the riverside at this point. It’s tempting to blame Titus for this too, but in all likelihood the path would always have bent around the water mill (Dixon’s) that was on this site before Salts. Eleanor’s picture highlights the rather unkempt, overgrown state of the path even in this World Heritage Site section.

When you cut down towards the river though, things rapidly become much less inviting…

 

 

 

The river path is slippery with moss in numerous spots…

… and decorated with charming touches (though Eleanor felt this could be a place to hang art work!)

 

Time to let Eleanor’s eye do the talking…

 

 

 

Eleanor liked these thistles a lot… They’re wild flowers, of course – ‘weeds’. As I discussed with her, letting things grow, or ‘letting things go’ isn’t always a bad idea. The thing she liked most on this walk were the little blue flowers on this plant (and others like it) growing unbidden out of the perimeter wall at Victoria Mills… It’s a cliche to say it, perhaps, but nature will find its own right of way….

 

 

 

 

Lower Holme – picture story

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Under what circumstances might a new-build KFC going up near your home seem like a good idea? Read on and decide for yourself…

Shipley’s history (like Bradford’s more broadly) is inextricably tied up with the history of the wool industry and its mills… A particular mill site that has interested us during the Multi-Story Water project (it’s the location for the closing scene of our ‘Red Route’ walk) is Lower Holme mill, on the north side of Aire slightly to the east of Baildon Bridge.

To orientate your a bit, here’s an image not of Lower Holme but of the adjacent site, when it was occupied by the Airedale Combing plant. In this shot you can clearly see the River Aire towards the bottom left – running down from the weir that used to serve the long-disappeared Baildon water mill. The image gives you an idea of the sheer scale of Airedale Combing, once one of Bradford’s most advanced mills….

Note also in this shot the pathway that cuts diagonally across the bottom left corner of the combing plant. This is the ancient right of way along the north bank of the river – which cuts inland slightly at this point before meeting Otley Road near Baildon Bridge. That same route is still there, because it’s a protected footpath – but everything around it has since changed!

In this shot, we’re looking from the opposite angle to the first one — so that’s Airedale Combing again on the right, with the river visible above it in the picture. And next to it is the sprawling site of the (even bigger!) Lower Holme mill… The lot it occupies was owned for a period in the 19th Century by Titus Salt himself, and local historian Ian Watson believes it may have beeen the site originally intended for Salts Mill itself (his persuasive argument is outlined in his pamphlet “The Land Acquisitions of Titus Salt in Shipley and Baildon”). But Salt never developed the site, and sold it on to C.F. Taylor in 1862. To many people, the mill site is still known simply as “C.F. Taylor’s”.

This shot – clearly more recent! – shows Lower Holme, with a rather different set of buildings, following the demolition of both Airedale Combing (the empty site at the top of the picture — now occupied by B&M and other retail outlets) and the next mill along. Note that the line of the ancient riverside path is still clearly visible, curling between the buildings at the top of the shot (it’s now thoroughly fenced in!). Note also the two facing rows of Lower Holme’s mill houses in the bottom right of the picture. They’re the only buildings still standing today, and are still occupied by residents (about fifty-fifty private ownership and Accent Housing Association). The angle below, from the same helicopter fly-past, shows the houses prominently in the bottom of the shot…

Looking at this image, it’s worth bearing in mind that – according to the Environment Agency’s flood mapping, the entire space between the river (top of shot) and the road (bottom) is flood plain… All of those houses could flood in an extreme event, although in 2000 – during the last major flooding in the Shipley area – only the first four houses on either side, nearest the river, suffered from flooding, and at basement level (water coming up through the ground) rather than flowing in at ground level.

In a sense, the more serious “flooding” suffered at Lower Holme has been from economic rather than hydrological causes… Here we see the current, derelict state of the Lower Holme lot – with only one of the mill buildings surviving, just to the south of the mill houses. This was converted as flats just before the bottom fell out of the property market in 2008 – and the building remains unoccupied, with broken windows etc. Meanwhile, the new residential development planned for the cleared mill site (demolition was in 2006) never even got off the ground…

The property developers in question, the Mandale Group, have left these fetching metal hoardings surrounding the site for the last five or six years — creating something of an eyesore for residents, and arguably attracting “undesirables” to the area (as in the ‘broken windows’ theory of anti-social behaviour – if a place looks neglected and uncared for, it will attract carelessness…).

As you can see from this shot, taken a couple of months ago, Mandale have been trying to sell the site on for some time…

And in the absence of the developers, the riverbank itself has started to reclaim the site. One of the Lower Holme residents, Lynda, has walked around the derelict site and identified the ‘weeds’ as common riverside plant species…

The story has a new twist, though, because Mandale have recently succeeded in selling the site, to Marshall Commercial Developments. James Marshall, who is (rather intriguingly) the son of the man who oversaw the conversion of the Airedale Combing site into the current retail park area, has kindly provided the planning diagrams below, which show what he’s intending for the site… (as he says, they’re in the public domain, so there’s no secret about them – but the planning application has yet to be approved)

To see the picture at full size, just click on it. The eagle-eyed viewer will note that the developer named on the plans is “Mandale Commercial”: Marshalls are basically planning to move ahead with the last set of plans that Mandale had drawn up. The difference is that, where it seem Mandale was badly hit by the downturn in the property market, and could no longer borrow the money to pursue the build, Marshalls can afford to pursue the project because they don’t need to borrow. As a family firm for four generations, they have kept their assets in the company, to secure longevity (rather than stripping them out at the first opportunity). The main part of the site, then, will be occupied by a KFC – to the left of the plans, facing the main road – and a Wickes DIY store, to the right, next to the river. There’s also quite a bit of car parking space, and the old mill building is designated for “offices” (though James tells me it may end up as social housing).

Anyway, here’s what the KFC might look like, if they get planning permission…

What do you think? Is the potential nuisance value of having this near your home greater or less than the current nuisance value and eyesore of having the mill site indefinitely surrounded by ugly metal hoardings….?

Lower Holme’s residents have until this week to lodge any concerns they have with the planning authorities. What would you say?

(P.S. A week on… with the planning objection deadline having passed… and I learn that not all of the residents had even been informed of the planning application! Surely insult added to injury.)

 

Incidents and Accidents (and Medicis)

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I’m acutely conscious that I haven’t been doing a very good job of keeping this blog up to date… what with having been so busy with the planning and scripting of our performance events coming up in September, and dealing with the small matter of moving jobs (from Leeds Uni to Manchester Uni, though that shift doesn’t affect this project). So to start to bring things up to date, here’s a room I was in yesterday:

Doesn’t look very exciting like this, to be sure, but this is the Incident Room at the Environment Agency’s Yorkshire offices at Phoenix House (on the South side of Leeds). So this was the nerve centre of the EA’s emergency response during the recent flooding crises in Calderdale (Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd, etc.). You must fill in, through your imagination, images of people frantically charging about, sticking post-its on the boards at the back…

I’ll say more in another post (promises, promises) about the productive meeting with EA representatives that I had in this room yesterday, but right now I’ll rewind back a few days more to last weekend… when I returned from my summer holiday to discover that, while I was off sunning myself in Italy, there had been flash flooding very close to Shipley… just to the South in Frizinghall. See this BBC report. In fact, the Frizinghall area falls at least in part within the Shipley ward, and it was very much on our radar when we started this project (see the “Photo Tour” page of this site and scroll to the bottom) — partly because EA flood maps for the area indicate a clear risk of flash flooding on Red Beck, a tributary of Bradford Beck. Red Beck comes down a fairly steep incline, and is largely culverted underground, so if you stand on the streets it runs under or between (Redburn Road [!], Wharnecliffe Rd. and Norwood Avenue) you would never know you were in a flood risk area… It’s certainly not on a ‘plain’, and there’s no sign of water. Which is kind of intriguing, but the area’s geography also made it very tricky for us to build effectively into this project — largely for aesthetic reasons (there’s little sense of visual spectacle or intriguing history to work with in this area, in creating a performance event), but also partly for reasons of sensitivity: nobody here is going to thank us, we thought, if through performance we draw public attention to this place as a potential flood zone… because people might well worry that such exposure might affect property values, insurance premiums, etc. So we decided to focus our project’s attentions on the Aire’s journey through Shipley (where flood risk should be self-evident)…  But now, of course, Frizinghall has had public attention drawn to it anyway.

There’s an irony of some sort in here… But since I’m not sure what it is, let’s instead scroll back slightly further to that Italian holiday I mentioned. We were in Tuscany, which is a bit of a tangential leap from Shipley, in terms of site specifics, but this project was still on my mind of course. Which is why I was intrigued to discover this map in the Palazzo Vecchio in Florence…

Palazzo Vecchio is the former seat of the Medici dynasty, the building that Michaelangelo’s David stands at the doorway to (well, it’s a replica David now – they moved the original safely indoors a while ago). Inside is the ‘map room’, right next to the room that was once Niccolo Machiavelli’s office… It contains maps of every part of the known world – as it was known back in the 15th Century – so like that EA office it’s a kind of panoptic incident room – an expression of the Medicis’ power of surveillence over the known world. And if you look closely at this rather wonky map of the British Isles…

The word “Leaf” in the middle is presumably Leeds, “Vachefeld” is Wakefield, and it doesn’t take a genius to work out what “Halaifax” is (even if it has become rather oddly proximate to Preston!). Weirdly inaccurate as the mapping certainly is, you can see how the Humber catchment is the key way in which the North of England has been mapped (presumably by people travelling on boats upriver, given that15th C. roads would have been a bit ropey…). The Humber catchment of course includes the Aire, and there it clearly is, disappearing into the Pennines past “Leaf”…

Of course in Florence, the river is the Arno (which has four letters and starts with A, so I’m claiming a Radio 2 link to the Aire), which features very prominently on Renaissance representations of the city…

As you can see from this drawing, the city’s very flat… It’s very much built on a flood plain (even despite all those medieval hilltop towns in the area…), as too is Pisa — which is further downstream on the Arno, as it widens to meet the Mediterranean. It turns out that the leaning tower of Pisa, which (I can confirm) really does lean…

… is so tilting because it’s built on the flood plain (even though it is quite a distance from the river), and thus on land which is basically alluvial silt. Apparently it took them centuries to realise that the architecture of the tower wasn’t the problem, just its footprint on this very squishy bit of earth. Just within the last twenty years they completed work to stabilise the tower by sucking up earth from underneath the north (non-load-bearing) side, so that the building sat back on itself by a few degrees. They could have kept going, apparently, and turned it into the Non-Leaning Tower of Pisa, but they figured that would be bad for the tourism.

Regardless, this puts in a funny kind of perspective the 1950s housing estate that Shipley Council built on Coach Road next to the Aire, also on alluvial silt… The architects realised that if you put too much weight in any one spot then the buildings would sink, so these houses were built without foundations or basements. Basically they’re constructed on concrete ‘rafts’ that are, in effect, floating on the surface of the land, with the rafts distributing the weight of the building across the whole surface area rather than at particular pressure points. Under people’s carpets is a layer of asphalt, which is smeared onto four and a half inch thick concrete slabs, and below those is a bed of hard core, and that’s it… The houses are floating, but at least they ain’t leaning…

By the way, if you’re wondering why I know so much about the precise widths of concrete in the floors, well…. that’s for another posting…

A Midsummer Night’s Dream…

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The other night, Monday June 25th, I had the opportunity to join David Robinson and his dog Oscar on their evening walk up to Shipley Glen from the Higher Coach Road estate. Despite having spent a lot of time now, working on this project in the vicinity of the river, I hadn’t previously been up the hill for want of someone to show me the way around. David generously offered to do the tour – and we just happened to pick what turned out to be an utterly glorious evening of midsummer weather…

Our luck with the weather was all the more remarkable given that, only a few days earlier, the miserable rainy conditions we’ve experienced during much of June resulted in flood warnings across the county. Although the worst of it was in the Calder Valley rather than the Aire, the high water here was still more than apparent at the swollen Hirst Wood weir just yards upstream from David’s house (which faces directly onto the river). In the image above, a tree has been carried downstream and caught on the weir – it’ll have to be cleared by the Environment Agency, I presume.

David told me that he received an automated call from the EA on Friday night advising him to take precautions and move personal items upstairs because the Aire was about to burst its banks. Despite having never previously received such a call (he didn’t even realise he was in the system), David “ignored it and went to bed” – quite confident that there was no danger of the water coming anywhere near his house. Sure enough, the Aire did break its banks that night, but did not encroach far up the green flood plain.  Which sort of begs the question of who the “experts” in these circumstances actually are…

David’s walking tour took me up the hill from his riverside estate, walking initially through a meadow which can’t be farmed as it’s preserved as an SSSI (site of special scientific interest). Popular with dog-walkers, and on a night like this rendering great views of Shipley and Saltaire across the river – that’s the Shipley parish church to the left.

We made our way up through the steeply rising oak woodland of Shipley Glen, up to the plateau area at the edge of Baildon Moor (above), where the Victorians used to flock for fairground attractions. Traces of the old downhill Toboggan ride (early roller coaster!) are still apparent in rocks where postholes and some old ironwork survive.

We encountered a much more intriguing Victorian relic, though, when heading back down through the woods and West towards Milner Field. Here’s the small reservoir (above) that was built by Titus Salt to siphon water from the Trout Beck (the stream that meets the Aire just yards from David’s house). According to David, this provided Salts Mill with a back-up water supply in order to sustain its own dying operation. And it’s the water channelled from this reservoir which is then pumped across the Aire by those dome-shaped pumping stations near the weir. Around this now-neglected reservoir there’s an intriguing set of engineered channels, again showing evidence of the recent high water… David said that the debris caught in the image below was not there the last time he’d walked this way, only days previously…

A little further to the west, and we entered through the neglected gateway to the Milner Field house and estate built by Titus Salt Jr. to show off his family’s wealth… There’s a long, winding road – largely overgrown – lined on both sides with many non-oak trees that were clearly planted as a kind of botanical avenue en route to the house. But the house itself is long gone… Salt’s Mill and its industrial village survive as a World Heritage Site, but his son’s grand house is nothing but ruination, lost in the undergrowth of the oak woodland that has reclaimed the site…

In the image above you can see traces of low archways (perhaps once the mouths of ovens??), amidst many other mossed-over loose stones. Wandering around this site is like finding a stately home as a disassembled jigsaw, strewn all over the place. You try to puzzle out what part of the house might have been where, but there’s very little to go on.

Following the gothic mystery tour, we made our way back along the river through Hirst Wood, in positively idyllic conditions as the evening sunlight showcased individual trees in glorious colour. The water is high, but this only adds to the sense of a wooded landscape blending and almost merging with the waterscape….

And finally, back towards Saltaire and the train back to Leeds – the sun still setting at 10pm… Thankyou David Robinson, for a really inspiring, intriguing evening.

Flood!

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So after a miserable week of rain, wind, low grey cloud (it’s June!), tonight we have flood warnings all over West Yorkshire. The River Calder has burst its banks at Hebden Bridge, Mytholmroyd, and elsewhere… So far though Aire seems to be behaving itself, but – not wishing to feel left out – here are some pictures from the last serious floods in the Shipley-Saltaire-Baildon area, back in 2000.

“It was as if there were two rivers.” Here’s the green flood plain in the Higher Coach Road area, west of Roberts Park. The river itself to the left of this line of trees, the grass (?!) to the right…

Again, the Higher Coach Road flood plain, this time looking east (downstream). The river proper would be to the right of the trees on the right.

xxHomes at the bottom of Bowland Avenue, near the ‘beehive’ pumping station. The flood water came right up the embankment in front of these homes, but did not quite tip over it.

The ‘beehive’ and debris bonfire from the path in front of the Bowland Ave homes.

Seen from the same location, the bridge/aqueduct over the river…

Here’s the cricket pitch at Roberts Park, turned into a lake…

Half Moon Cafe overlooking the cricket lake…

Other half of the same image – Saltaire Lakeside Village!

bAnd here’s the Boathouse pub across the river from the cricket pitch, with the waterside steps completely underwater… This image and the ones below kindly loaned by Stewart Gledhill…

Here’s the cricket pitch again, as the water is starting to drain off it, leaving a pathway in the grass.

Just a bit further downstream, looking west towards Salts Mill across the river, with housing to the right that – again – normally looks out onto green flood plain.

Baildon Recreation Centre, now fronted by a lake… And again, below…

Below, the Woodbottom cricket pitch near Baildon Bridge….

And the homes at Aire Close… (the only four houses built right next to the river)

Below, looking up to Coach Road as the flood waters recede, leaving debris in their wake…

Dark Arches, Leeds

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So here’s the River Aire as it runs through the centre of Leeds — a dozen or so miles downstream from Shipley and Baildon… This is the view out from beneath the Dark Arches under Leeds Station. Only the Victorians would have decided to build a train station across a major river…

Anyway, point is, the other weekend Leeds played host to OVERWORLDS AND UNDERWORLDS (May 18-20) — the city’s contribution to the Cultural Olympiad (whatever that is), on which around £1.2 million had allegedly been spent bringing in the international art duo, the Quay Brothers, to present a large scale installation and performance event around the City Centre. A centrepiece of this was the various things happening under the dark arches in a kind of Tim Burton-esque gothic fantasy…

There were various rooms with various strange, dance or movement activities going on, lit with stark and moody lighting (the woman in this image went on to do a passionate little dance duet a moment later, with some random bloke who turned up to join her). These bits and pieces felt a bit unsatisfactory to me, and they paled into insignificance next to the way that the space itself — and the river — had been lit for theatrical effect…

This photo (like all of these, shot on my mobile phone) doesn’t do any justice to the spectacle of the swirling, gurgling River Aire as it rushed through the Victorian archways, cut by chiaroscuro lighting and accompanied by eerie, ambient music.

In this shot you can’t quite make out the river itself for the lighting, but I loved the way that an old security feature — this coil of ancient, cobwebbed barbed wire — had been picked out and turned into a kind of shadow opera on the ceiling…

And then there was this bit — the centrepiece of the installation — where a whole row of arches had been lit up with projections. The glass ceiling of the Victoria Quarter — the covered shopping arcade at the other end of the Quays’ city centre installation zone — had been transplanted through light onto the stone ceiling of the Dark Arches. This was a really extraordinary thing to behold (again, the photo doesn’t do it any justice), and I really liked this idea of “site specific art” being made “specific” by trading the features of related sites!

Having said all that, though… and leaving aside the question of where exactly the million quid went (!?) … the whole experience seemed kind of inadequate as an expression of the river and the architecture. We were provided with spectacle, certainly, but that was about it — there was little to no sense of narrative involved here, and I learned nothing about this amazing location and its history other than what I could see visually. Still more problematic was the sense that this installation had just been flown in by outsiders. Had the people of Leeds had been consulted in any way over its development, or involved in its delivery? (except perhaps to wear hi-vis vests and mind the doors)  There was a vital sense in which the human dimension of the site was therefore lacking, even as the river ploughed on regardless….

All of which is by way of saying: I hope we can do something rather different in Shipley, on that bit of the Aire, come September. We’ve a miniscule fraction of the budget to work with, but the people and their stories are already giving us vastly more content….  (Hope we don’t blow it.)