In early 2018 Leeds Industrial Museum, working with a local secondary school Swallow Hill Community College and the Leeds City Council library service, provided the location for a filming project about the history of the local area.
Upon discovering, from our Interwoven Histories exhibition, that the mill had employed workers from around the world in the 1960s, this was worked into the film by the students to increase accuracy and representation.
The film went on to win awards at the Leeds Young Filmmakers ceremony, and has been screened at Leeds Industrial Museum at Armley Mills (and across the city) since.
We’ve been looking at work of the The Women of Colour Index Reading Group (WOCI). WOCI Reading Group was set up in October 2016 by artists, Samia Malik, Michelle Williams Gamaker and Rehana Zaman. The group on a monthly basis to discuss work within the WOCI; a unique collection of slides and papers collated by artist Rita Keegan that chart the emergence of Women of Colour artists during the ‘critical decades’ of the 1980s and 1990s. Reading group sessions aim to improve the visibility of women of colour artists whilst using material in the archive to generate discussion, thought and practice around current social and political concerns. All people of all backgrounds, genders, sexualities, religions and race are welcome.
Between October 2016 and June 2017 the WOCI Reading Group held monthly workshops at the Women’s Art Library, Goldsmiths University, a reading group during the Radical Black Arts Convention Revisited as part of The Place is Here at Nottingham Contemporary, a reading group as part of 56 Artillery Lane, Raven Row, London, an in conversation for COOL ATMOSPHERES: Performing Inner Songs featuring Priya Srinivasan, Uthra Vijay and Andrea Campaneau at The Showroom, London, and a workshop for I/Mages of Tomorrow anti conference hosted by the Centre for Feminist Research at Goldsmiths, University of London. Our sessions have focused on seminal exhibitions such as Testimony: Three Black Women Photographers (1986) and The Image Employed: the Use of Narrative in Black art (1987), and artists such as Zarina Bhimji, Martina Attile, Jagjit Chuhan, Sharon Curtis, Nina Edge, Maxine Walker, Sutapa Biswas, Sonia Boyce and Chila Kumari Burman.
The WOCI Reading Group is indebted to and inspired by the work of black women of colour artists and cultural practitioners who precede us, work alongside us and who, through their projects, art works and activities, have been influential to the critical practice and feminist politics of the reading group. Foremost amongst these is Rita Keegan, artist, lecturer and archivist, whose meticulous work compiling fragments and documents that detail the diverse practices of various women of colour artists, makes up the Index. We are acutely aware of the significance of the works and practices that are made visible within the archive as well as those that remain hidden - experiences and ideas that have been relegated to the past yet remain viscerally relevant to our present times. We hope by engaging these works we are able to activate the archive and locate this work firmly in the current moment.
A short film exploring the origins and impact of the Rock against Racism movement in Leeds. Rock Against Racism (RAR) was a grass roots movement which organised gigs to show resistance to the growing popularity of the National Front. Starting in London in 1978, it soon spread through the UK. This film was made as part of the Leeds Music Sound Bites display at Leeds City Museum, on until April 2018.
- Max Farrar in: Caryl Philips, Foreigners: Three English Stories, Northern Lights, Vintage 2007
Chapeltown’s history is written into its architecture. Its huge semi-detached and terraced houses, built for the prosperous, Christian new middle classes in the early 1900s, its two parks and its wide, tree-lined streets are now interspersed with buildings, which were once synagogues, and Asian-owned mini-markets selling the produce of the world. Halfway up Chapeltown Road there’s a wall which, throughout the seventies, bore the inscription REMEMBER OLUWALE in huge white letters. Near that wall there’s an ugly vacant lot, which, until recently, was the site of the elegant country club built in the twenties for those prosperous Christians. The club became Chapeltown’s most notorious pub. White Leeds imagined that inside the Hayfield every type of black sinner was making mischief. A curious corollary of this fantasy was that the Hayfield became a kind of ‘black space’, where whites only entered if they accepted the rules laid down by the black men who played dominoes, drank, sold a little weed and checked the ladies. Since these rules were easy to accept - mutual respect and tolerance, whatever status the outside world conferred upon you - lots of adventurous whites found themselves at home there. It’s said that David Oluwale frequented a similar place in Chapeltown, a nightclub called, in this day, the Glass Bucket, but I’m pretty certain the early evening would have found him in the Hayfield. The Hayfield was erased from the map around 2004 - yet another sign of the city’s inability to deal properly with its black citizens.
- Ian Duhig in: The Hounding of David Oluwale, London : Vintage
When I moved to Leeds in 1974, the city's reputation for coldness and brutality was of mythic dimensions even among poets. Martin Bell, who came and stayed until his death execrated the place in a sequence he called 'The City of Dreadful Something', which included the line parodying Marlowe, 'Why, Leeds is Hell, nor am I out of it!' Never in it, even on a visit, Patrick Kavanagh could nevertheless define despair as 'like winter alone in Leeds'.
My first job locally was as a casual labourer in Hepworth's cloth warehouse in Claypit Lane, just up from the Merrion Centre ('with its special subways for mugging' — Bell). In fact, my workmates were very friendly to me, only setting off the more their coldness to a security guard who worked there called Kitching, which I didn't understand. Then they told me his story. Apart from his crimes, which they felt shamed their city, they resented this soft job he'd walked straight into after a soft and short time in open prison. I looked at him more closely in the light of this. He was a shadow of the bully his ruined physique still suggested he was once good at, and his eyes were beginning to hollow out because of the drink. But we were all haunted by Oluwale, whose name would be hissed after him in much the same way that it was chanted at police by the Elland Road Kop, as abuse of abusive authority.
I worked a lot with homelessness agencies in Leeds after this time and the example of what happened to Oluwale lay before them all as demonstrating the depths to which the city's inhospitability could sink if it wasn’t challenged. Kitching remained a different kind of example for me, an example demonstrating the truism that we become like what we hate: he treated Oluwale hatefully like a pariah, then Kitching was a hated pariah. And that is how he will be remembered in this city.
- Kester Aspden, 2008, The Hounding of David Oluwale, London : Vintage
[…] it was rare to see a black face in Leeds. Only five Africans were recorded in the 1921 census. Sikh peddlers and hawkers were familiar sights on the streets in the late 1920s, and there were a few dozen Chinese in the city; Indian and Egyptian students added colour to Leeds's workaday red-brick university from the 1920s — but Leeds's public face was barely changed. A black person walking on the streets of the city was an object of crude fascination. Ces Thompson, who came to Leeds from the West Indies just before the outbreak of the Second World War (and became, in the early 1950s, the first black person to represent Great Britain in rugby league), walked curtain-twitching streets with some trepidation. Somebody once shouted after him, 'Hi, nigger boy, did you come out of your mother's arse?'
Leeds citizens might have read about the arrival of the Windrush at Tilbury and the British Nationality Act — those foundational moments in the making of modern multiracial Britain — but a decade after Ces first walked the streets of Hunslet a black face in the city was still rare enough to excite comment. In Leeds the first settlers from the Caribbean were ex-servicemen, mainly from the RAF, who'd been demobilised in 1947 and 1948 and staved to find work. Young single males, they lodged together in those few houses which would have them. In Woodhouse, 20 Clarendon Road was the house where the locals said the darkies lived. This is how it stayed until the early 1950s when an increasing number of West Indians began to find a ready supply of rented accommodation in the Chapeltown area as the last remnants of the Jewish community withdrew from their 'Little Israel' for leafier suburbs further up the Harrogate Road. A 1953 government working party on 'Coloured People seeking Employment' reported that Leeds had a black population of recent growth numbering between five and six hundred. Even then the black newcomers were well outnumbered by displaced Poles, Latvians, Lithuanians and Estonians, whose presence in the city aroused far less comment and animosity. […]
The usual response to black people seeking rented accommodation in Leeds was the slammed door. Sensing an opportunity, a canny Irishwoman who had worked as a cleaner at the university, Helen McCrum, began to buy up houses and let rooms to the small number of blacks in the city. She grandly advertised her properties as 'Private Hotels', charging around £2 a week for bed and board, which took care of a good chunk of a foundry labourer's wages. One of Mrs McCrum's properties was 12 Grove Terrace, a three-storey red-brick terrace in the Little London area of the city, at the bottom end of Camp Road. Most of the Leeds Africans passed through this house at some point. Camp Road was a part of the city with a notorious reputation. In 1949 a special report in the Yorkshire Evening Post attributed the area's decline to the 'foreign element, a floating population inhabiting single carpetless rooms in the once handsome houses of Victorian gentry'; these new arrivals were responsible for nightly brawls, prostitution, assaults on women and `un-British attacks with knives, pepper and ginger'. Scattered among Camp Road's indigenous population and the descendants of nineteenth-century Irish immigration were a few Sikh hawkers and peddlers; a few Pakistanis; poor Jews who'd never made it to Chapeltown, never mind the suburbs; 'displaced persons' from Central and Eastern Europe; small numbers of Jamaicans and Africans. It was an unlovely setting of clothing factories, printing works, stone and timber yards, rough pubs, army barracks; the only greenery the residents of 12 Grove Terrace could see was the North Street recreation ground, known locally as the 'Jews' Park' (or, more derogatorily, as 'Sheeny Park').
