East End Park: this is where we live. The blooming Glensdales.

COVEN will go on presenting aspects of our lives here in East End Park, some good, some bad, and today a ray of sunshine in one of the most talked about streets in our neighbourhood.

This is Paul, in front of his house on Glensdale Terrace. He is a keen gardener, and since the street-lined back-to-backs have no gardens, he is creating one, out there on the street.




He is making window boxes, and he grows flowers and vegetables from seed. Now, the gardening bug is spreading on the street. The neighbours like them, and they asked Paul to make window boxes for them, and now the whole street is in bloom.



Where else in Richmond Hill you can find fresh courgettes and beautiful courgette flowers, I wonder? Well, Glensdale Terrace is an unlikely place, but Paul's efforts have proven that it doesn't take too much to transform a place: a lot of imagination and a lot of hard work, but, that's about it.



And yes, he has even managed to find a new use for that piece of old guttering: now it's filled with flowers, brightening up the place.




If you take a walk on the Glensdales these days, you might be surprised by what you will see.

What Paul has done, is proof that you don't necessarily need big stale organisations to do neighbourhood management and regeneration, as it has been the case in our area for a number of years, without much success. But you will need big ideas and a lot of hard work.

More fly tipping at the Old York Road Library 15 June 2011

Once again the Old York Road Library is the scene of fly tipping.  This time a domestic fridge, broken vacuum cleaners and household rubbish are amongst the things that have been abandoned there.  The site is just behind the All Saints Primary School and the rubbish, especially the fridge, presents a serious danger to any adventurous children who might be tempted to play there.  This matter has already been reported to the relevant council department.

The old library building itself has still not been made secure as the vandal-proof door has been vandalised yet AGAIN and the temporary roof which the landlord was ordered to put on the building (he chose plastic) is already torn and coming lose exposing some of the rafters to the weather.  

The fitting and repairing of the drain pipes to the building, as ordered in the Schedule 1 issued by the council, was not done at all and what water the damaged roof does manage to catch simply runs down the walls of the building, either internally or externally.  These matters have also been reported to the council officers.   COVEN and the Civic Trust are continuing to monitor the state of the building.

While this building is in its present state it will continue to attract many forms of illegal and anti-social behaviour, some of which will have to be paid for by the landlord but some of which have to be put right by the council (such as the constant fly tipping and recent theft of the drain covers).  

This building needs to be properly secured and then it needs to be found a use which would mean that as an occupied building it would offer less chance of further vandalism.  As things stand at the moment the council and therefore us the Council Tax payers will have to continue to fork out for the costs of repeated clean ups around the area of the building until a proper solution is found. 

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East End Park: this is where we live...

These pictures were taken last week, from the back of the Edmund House Social club, looking across the railroad.





This is a view of our little neighbourhood, in all its Victorian Splendour- this is what we want to preserve.

Come along to the Forum and have your say

The next meeting of the Richmond Hill Community Forum is being held tomorrow at 6.00pm at the newly re-furbished Richmond Hill Community Centre on Long Close Lane.

Come along and listen to what is being said and have your own say.  This is a chance to put your point across to the councillors and the council officers who have your lives in their hands.

We look forward to seeing as many of you as possible tomorrow.

The first meeting of the Cupcake Book Club

The first meeting of the Cupcake Book Club took place at the Spring Close Tavern at 7.30pm on Tuesday 31 May 2011 and proved to be a huge success as a thoroughly enjoyable evening was had by all involved.

Local residents met together in cosy and pleasant surroundings to discuss books, good and bad and many, many other subjects and to socialise with their friends and neighbours.

Delicious home made cakes were on offer provided by the members themselves and as well as the usual wide array of drinks normally available in a well run pub, including hand drawn specialist ales, tea and coffee flowed freely for those who preferred that.

Asghar Khan, our newest local Labour councillor, popped in to wish the members of the club every success and to offer his support for this much needed local initiative, he also enjoyed the cakes on offer.

The first book which had been chosen was The Queen and I by Sue Townsend and this book received a mixed reception, some of the people loved it and some loathed it which was only to be expected with such a varied group of residents we suppose but it certainly led to a lively, interesting and thoroughly friendly discussion.

The next book to be read, Odd Thomas by Dean Koontz, was chosen by Brian one of the members who recommended it to us all so we are all going to read it and share our views of the book at the next meeting of the Club at 7.30pm on Tuesday 5 July 2011 at the Spring Close Tavern.

We look forward to welcoming many new members in the future and to making this an enjoyable and convivial evening for people who share many different tastes but who like to meet and talk to each other and share their thoughts on books they have read or anything else that comes up so please accept our invitation to come along and enjoy yourselves with other like minded souls.

View from the Civic Hall

Our local library’s faith was sealed on Wednesday, when the Executive Board of the Leeds City Council met to vote on the recommendations. COVEN was present at the meeting, in order to follow up a campaign that we fought consistently, through involvement with the community, through our representation to the Leeds City Council and through this blog.

The good news from the meeting was that NOT all libraries earmarked for closure are going to be closed down. Communities all over Leeds fought to keep their libraries open and some succeeded. We didn’t.

Our neighbourhood is going to lose a very important resource, another one of a number of services closing down in the area, with purpose-built buildings increasingly left boarded up, such as the former Day Centre and soon, the hostel on Walter Crescent. Furthermore, as Cllr Golton noted at the meeting, the position of the mobile libraries brought in instead, will not match geographically the location of the library, leaving communities south of York Road without easy access to them.

Councillors from different wards commented on their localities’ needs but, unfortunately, none of our three councillors had anything to say on our behalf.

So, in our area, the library service will provide “targeted” children’s and family mobile services to the new Richmond Hill school, with a computer suite in the newly extended community centre. But although there will also be “fortnightly” mobiles for older people and weekly children’s mobiles, the mobile provision will be located in the part of Richmond Hill on the left of the railway, leaving the whole of East End Park, including the AllSaints’ primary school without any access to a library!!!

One other thing that felt really wrong was the councillors in the meeting, congratulating themselves on a “detailed” consultation. We have previously voiced our concerns over the nature of the consultation, but more problems with it emerged during the meeting. One of the main contributors in the consultation project was the Citizens’ Panel, which is mentioned often in the documents, sometimes having backed council proposals up to 90%. Only it turns out, as Cllr Carter noted, only 25% of the Citizens’ Panel questionnaires were returned!

So, when for example it is stated that “77% ( of the panel) agreed that the council should consolidate the number of libraries it has” in order to improve the quality, we are talking about the 77% of the 25%. You do the maths...