Newsletter

I’ve been away for a couple of weeks visiting friends and family up and down the country and have returned to cleared out bin yards, hurrah! It’s amazing how something so simple can make such a huge difference to an area, it’s taken a good few months but Leeds City Council came through in the end.  Hopefully the general levels of detritus blown around the street will decrease now too.

Also as the evenings are now lighter later my curtain twitching habit is surging again. It’s amazing how many little open backed vans trundle up and down our streets of an evening, peering into bin yards in the hope of a lovely abandoned fridge. With any luck the empty bin yards will stay that way and the trundling vans will fade away, rightly or wrongly I’ve assumed they’re scrap merchants looking for swag; sadly no rag and bone men any more.  Though I am almost certain I heard one calling out last year, he had a horse and everything when I had a look.

We’re also about to send out our first newsletter to the local community. It’ll update people on the future plans for demolition and refurbishment of the remaining properties, we’re also hoping to engage with more residents and encourage more attendance at the meetings and involvement in the area in general.

My task over the next few months, as well as finishing off a fairly large University assignment, is looking into the possibility of getting some funding to have wildflowers planted on the ground left after demolition. LCC can fund basic grassing of the areas which would be great, but we need to raise funds if residents would prefer a more aesthetic solution. There are other benefits to more diverse flora in an urban area too, such as encouraging wildlife back to urban areas and creating Bee Roads and there are potential sources of funding such as Plan Bee that I will be investigating.

LCC and Leeds Fed have done all the work so far to be fair, I’ve just set up a gmail account and searched for a non beer related head and shoulder shot of me to add as Chair of the group.  To say that I hate having my photo taken would be a huge understatement. I’m not the most photogenic person so it’s always a stressful experience looking at a picture of yourself and realising you don’t actually look like one of the cast of 90210 but as long as I don’t look like Ena Sharples I suppose it’s not too bad.

I’m also looking into a new community group meeting venue, our original venue has changed purpose (or got wise) so we can no longer use it and we have had to shift to a venue further away with no windows, so not overly conducive to comfortable discussion. I’ll wait to see what my enquiries bring.

Over the last month the sun has been shining which is very unusual for this time of year. Over the last two weeks in-between the sun shining the wind has also been blowing and the rain has been lashing down. Everything does looks better in the sun when it does shine and I suppose the rain has meant I haven’t had to water my tomato plants too much over the last 2 weeks.

My front yard is in a right state both my potted plants and the weeds are doing pretty well due to the aforementioned sun and rain. I’ve tackled the weeds with some nice chemicals and will try and tidy them up this weekend weather permitting; not one of nature’s gardeners me.  I also need to paint my front door, a task I have no idea how to start or even complete. I mean do you have to remove the door, or can you just clean and sand it in situ and hope for the best? And do I need special outdoor paint? I think that might wait until later in the summer.

Apparently you can often tell the privately owned properties in predominantly social or council owned housing estates by the state of their front doors. Privately owned houses are often in a worse state cosmetically, I’d certainly attest to that.

So I’ve mucked about with the Blog a bit too so if anyone is interested you can follow by email by entering your details in the little box provided and hopefully this means that you don’t have to set up a Google account if you don’t want to, though you may be added to a sinister database somewhere that could try to sell you Viagra and kidney transplants at a later date.

And that’s all the factual stuff for now so from Ena and me, hope you enjoyed reading and have a pint of stout on us (well we’re not paying, just buy it yourself).