I drop a circle on a map that centres on Bagby fields. I’ve never heard of it – despite living within two miles for over thirty years. A quick internet search tells me nothing except its name and location – the two things I’d already discovered from my Leeds map. Bagby Fields will remain a mystery, unvisited and circumnavigated.
My starting place is Chapeltown, Leeds. I’ve lived here for decades on a street that in the early 2000s the Guardian newspaper described as the ‘Meanest Street in Britain’.
It’s changed. No longer the red-light district. Only medium levels of crime last month, with most categories low or very low, and not a single report of a theft from a person. I should be safe on the street – even though the most frequent crime is violent/sexual, but that happens mostly in the home.
The streets are empty. I hear one church bell on this sunny Sunday morning – a single strike at ten-thirty. A call to prayer which seems to serve little purpose.
Shrick-shrick through tree leaves littering the pavement. A dry rustle with mushy undertones. The monkey puzzle tree fails to contribute any leaves. It’s not the most suitable tree for a small front garden. Already its arrow-tip top has pierced the sky above the roof line. It grows so slow, but just doesn’t stop. It’ll get to three or four times the height of the house. I see no other monkey puzzles today, but often admire them while driving around Leeds’s puzzling inner loop. For reasons unknown the council has chosen to plant plenty on roundabouts and central reservations.
There’s a pair of squirrels bouncing on the lawn reminding me of my neighbour’s twins. Their feet barely touch the ground before they leap again – as though the grass is lava ready to burn their delicate paws. They leap upon a tree that deceived me. It looks like two trees – one full of orange, red, and yellow autumnal tints, backed by another that has retained its summer greens – but it is all one tree. Autumn is not uniform. A magpie bounces on branches and cause an avalanche of gold to tumble in the sunlight.
My view is dominated by a large stone wall higher than my head. I’m in a narrow conservation corridor as wide as the buildings that line the main road. Large stone-fronted houses built in the nineteenth century. A hidden house from the 1830s has been engulfed by a synagogue that has turned into the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, its internal walls eradicated before its grade II listing.
Shop fronts. Shop backs. Two-faced. One covered in glossy facade the other de-faced by flocks of wheelie bins and caged air conditioners pumping out stale air. Bottle, bottle, bottle, tin, tissue, bottle, bottle. Dead fireworks – cubes of blackened tubes.
The sun shines on one side of the street. A sunshine lottery. A coin-toss chance of light. A posh patio set is double-shaded by a large green umbrella and its failure to be on the sunny side of the street. Pots of wilting flowers repose on a not-quite-white almost-linen cloth. On the sunny side a gazebo with mosquito net and candle jars fills a garden from gate to window, cancelling out their sunshine privilege.
Asian walls with silver-topped elegant bars echo the Victorian past. Evidence of recent bonfires blacken the already black tarmac. Red, broken bricks like flames among the ashes.
Two contrasting gable ends. One with new pointing and clean brickwork, but the quality of pointing deteriorates as I approach. New mortar jammed in wavy lines between each brick. No damp-cloth cleaning as the work was done. Too late. Fixed forever. Solid. Set. Where’s the Victorian pride?
The second gable retains its ancient pinpoint mortar marching straight-lined across the soot-blackened bricks. Here’s the Victorian downside.
My route is unintentionally green. A 5-mile circle dropped in an area of high-density homes, but somehow greener than a country walk. By the time I finish I’ll discover that perhaps 75% is off-road.
I turn onto a ginnel. A path, through rough grass stretching wider than a road on either side. Broken fences defend back gardens. Three-storey terrace on one side, smaller semi-detached and short terrace runs on the other. Local volunteers are creating an oasis in Chapeltown.
It’s a long thin oasis with no water. The single stream is made of tarmac. A bewilderingly bandaged tree hugs its bank. Like the peppered moth, the white bandages have evolved dark camouflage that hides them as they wind around the bark. Globes of apple green cling to the ends of bare branches. Tempting sustenance that would only disappoint.
A Carnival worthy street food stand hunkers half-hidden under garden shrubs. A home for Caribbean cuisine, hoping to survive the winter and return to Potternewton Park, where tens-of-thousands of carnival goers will descend in hungry hoards.
The densely packed terraces had no expectation that their narrow streets would flood with cars. The adjoining 1930s council homes live on wider roads. No horse-drawn back lanes. No brick-built hay lofts at the end of short, empty gardens. But still no driveways. No expectation of car ownership. But with larger gardens and pockets of ill-kempt public greenery dotted like chewing gum around each bus stop.
Diversity everywhere. Different coloured cars. Different classes of gardens. Some with debris strewn across unmanicured lawns. Some with home-grown pebbledash drives and not a blade of grass in sight. A beautiful mixed-race hydrangea with mauve flowers – a perfect blend of blue and pink. A well-groomed privet-edged fortress repelling all neighbours.
The increasing amplitude of swishing cars announces the dual-laned Scott Hall Road. Once the Grand Depart of the Tour de France where almost 200 riders chatted nonchalantly up three miles of hill. The gradient is 2% – a false-flat for these titans of sport.
There’s an unexpected vista of haze-covered Leeds. No Victorian smog. Just low, damp clouds touching the top of Bridgewater Place. The tallest building in Leeds until it was overtaken by developers keen to exploit the 37-storey wealth of students flocking to Leeds.
A sign points to the Caribbean Cricket Club. Founded in 1948 by Windrush men. Dew-covered grass turns my walking trainers a darker shade. The line on my map takes me behind the new pavilion opened by Collis King – the former West Indies player who smashed England for 86 from 66 balls to win the World Cup final at Lord’s in 1979. The place looks deserted. The season is all wrong, although there’s still crowd of white-clad fielders on the pitch. Travellers from overseas. Gulls with wings instead of pads.
I find a dog-worn path between two raised banks that ducks under a tangled hawthorn arch. Hawthorns live hard lives unlike elegant silver birch or indecisive branching oaks. Hawthorns twist and turn and snag. Their gnarled trunks have ridges sliced down their sides all the way to the ground.
It’s slippery and steep as I weave down the forested slopes of Sugarwell Hill. There’s a sudden quietness. I hardly notice the still audible cars. Trees catch and cushion the sound. Birds intervene.
A noticeboard announces that the hill was once just fields for grazing stock, before it boasts of planted trees and unseen wildlife – deer, birds, butterflies and flowers. I’m told of Oak and Rowan but no mention of the multitude of ash, sweet chestnut, elder, holly, sycamore, hazel, birch and red-berried hawthorn.
My internet research tells me an unrewarding tale that Sugarwell takes its name from the days when people mixed water with sugar on celebratory days. The story lacks substance even when they add liquorice to the mix.
Pando, the false forest of 47,000 trees in Utah tells a different tale. It is no forest at all but one single multi-stemmed 10,000-year-old Aspen tree united on shared roots.
I cross Meanwood beck and Meanwood Road and ascend the steep steps to Woodhouse Ridge. Another site of overgrown Victorian grandeur. There’s a bandstand relegated to a one-day-a-year festival revival.
I pass a gesticulating teenage boy talking intensely to his mother. A young woman asks her phone for tips. I can’t tell if she’s connected to a person or a power-grabbing data centre.
Dying cherry trees like Halloween ghosts hide cracked tarmac beneath their fallen leaves. A useless pair of metal motorbike-restriction posts provide a home for red, yellow, black, white, green graffiti tags revelling in a shaft of sunlight that vivid-ifies their intensity. A perfect dry-bush hedge along the side of an academy where a squirrel and a gull gossip on a round picnic table, next to a sign that tells me that today I have shown dedication.
I walk through a closed road that apologises for my inconvenience and I ignore the government request to find out more about dangerous and damp mould. The roadworks expose hidden layers of cobbled history and metal shuttered shops shout in vibrant colours about the nightly visits from spray-can artists.
For a short while I walk the pavement path outside student homes. A flock of female students pass. A single student leads her parents. Pink, white, black, pink, green, bobble hat – overdressed with a coat dangling from her arm. We’ve just had the warmest bonfire night on record. Signs of dying Halloween still haunt windows and bushes. Sagging pumpkins retreat into sunken faces.
Birds sing as I cross back to park-life greenery. Shorn lawns, planted trees in sentinel rows. An oak tree spreading sideways from its broken trunk – it failed the race for sufficient girth and was felled by the vandal’s arm.
A little library defines its place – calculus, integration, parliamentary reform, an integrated approach to geography, with a side of fiction from Stephen Fry. University land even though I haven’t reached the campus yet.
Two crows crowd a squirrel hoping to intimidate their way to Saturday night’s gastric delights. A blue-clad runner hurtles past.
Extensions. Dormers. Crushed single rooms. I speculate that the homes are divided and extended to squeeze students in and families out. A gate tied with party balloons proves my theory wrong or simply shows that students are not fully grown.
A tiny patch of woodland surrounding an unseen building. Glass-embedded-concrete tops the wall to keep this slice of nature secure.
Campus Land. A welcome sign with 110 places of interest – a host of faculties, institutes, buildings named for the great and good, sports facilities, and libraries.
It’s an empty world. As if on this Remembrance Sunday, 40,000 students and 10,000 staff have been taken up in the rapture. I think of those who disappeared in the wars – young men who lost their lives before they reached the age of the students who don’t surround me.
Lyddon Terrace looks like a film set with its row of 1820s houses and cobbled street. Lyddon Hall hides somewhere behind – once the home of William Boyne, a collector of coins, a writer of Leeds’s history, who made money from tobacco, picked by enslaved people of African descent. The Boyne’s moved on to Queen Square – a Georgian Square just North of Leeds that has recently been colonised by the university. Lyddon Hall became home to Mary and Wilson Armistead who collected goods and funds for newly emancipated people in the United States. It now houses 70 students.
Benches. Empty bike racks. Leaves cluttering the guttering. A red beehive the size of a commercial wheelie bin hums. No bees, just air-conditioning forcing air through slats – no honey-covered combs, just dust-collecting filters extracted by estate workers.
I weave my way through this foreign land where disparate Grade II listed buildings nestle side by side –classical Beech Grove House from 1799, modernist concrete Edward Boyd Library of 1975. Just this month the Brutalist Roger Stevens Building was given the People’s Choice Award as part of Leeds Architecture Awards. There’s something about it that reminds me of the oppressive bureaucracy of Central Services in Terry Gilliam’s dystopian film Brazil.
Tucked away are hidden gardens, smoker shelters that look like summer houses and the Roger Stevens Pond with its floating planters aimed to provide the perfect biodiverse environment that encourages natural ecosystems to emerge. Silver birch has already self-seeded on these shallow shores.
I emerge into the real world and cross the A58(M) – a 40-mph bracketed motorway entrenched through Leeds City centre. Parts of the hospital force the four lanes of traffic to drop into a tunnel and hide its noise.
I enter a coffee shop and am warned of the impending two minutes of silence. It creeps up. Conversations are stilled with no public announcement. A father, mother and son stare at their coffee cups. I sit with many memories of near fatalities and injury. Through the tall window I look down on the entrance to the children’s Accident and Emergency department where I have spent too many hours, too many nights, too many worries.
The silence ends with a thank you and small talk resumes.
I haven’t quite left the clutches of university life. The Rose Bowl lecture hall bulges out towards the back of Leeds Civic Hall. The modern green-tinted glass reflecting the off-white Portland stone that’s not as old as it looks.
The seven-storey Brutalist Woodhouse Lane car park doesn’t appear to have won architectural awards but is impressive on its island of well-mown grass with its external ramp held up by hair-like cables dangling from a tooth comb of fourteen concrete beams.
I pass my last student outpost. Sky Plaza was the world’s tallest student accommodation when built. Together with its shorter neighbour, it houses more people than the average village, but this is no permanent settlement – it’s full of nomads who disappear in a few short years.
I’m hit by swish-swish sounds as I recross the A58(M) and descend through the new glass-fronted apartments of Carlton Gate. Suddenly the road slips out of sight behind a tree-lined bank and sucks away the noise. A park pops into view. A subway with its angry embellished mouth sucks me to the foot of Oatland Court. Rectangles of yellow mustard try to disguise the grey monoliths.
Sun shines on one solitary solar roof slapped in the centre of nine terrace box-like houses. The path leads under a bedroom where one house reaches out to touch the next. I wonder what those who sleep above think of those who walk below.
A pine tree with clusters of needles that converge on a verdant green heart that looks ready for spring while most trees still strive to shed their summer coats. A bright blue pallet brightens the leaf-covered bank and MiK has enlivened a grey wall with tags of whites and yellows and blues and greens.
A tall Alder tree prospers between a six-lane junction and a two-lane slip road. Alders like the damp. Perhaps they’ve tapped the sunken Sheepscar Beck – an historic water course refurbishedwith £1.5 million to protect 250 businesses and 50 homes from floods. Alder, a native tree, largely unknown despite their beautiful spring-time yellow catkin flush.
My favourite bus, the 36, heads to Harrogate. The quiet, comforting battery-powered engine is overshadowed by the horrendous squeal of its brakes.
A flush of red and orange Pyracantha berries greets me and I am welcomed back to Chapeltown by a mosaic that promises a world of opportunity, diverse as the world itself and encourages me to expand and free my mind.
This walk was undertaken in November 2025 as part of the psychogeography unit of my MA in Creative Writing. Psychogeography was a term coined in 1955 by Guy Debord who defined it as ‘the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behaviour of individuals’. The best known examples of modern British psychogeographic writing are Iain Sinclair’s London Orbital and Will Self’s Psychogeography, which is mostly a collection of his column in the Independent, which ran for five years from 4 October 2003.