People In Headingley

snapshots of  the people who make headingley

Kay Mellor Author and Script Writer
"I have lived and worked in Leeds all my life and Headingley has proved to be the perfect base for me for many years. It also provides me with inspiration for my writing every day. In fact, Fat Friends the TV drama and brand new musical (premiering at Leeds Grand Theatre on 7th November!) is set in Headingley.

The centre of Headingley is so vibrant and has so much to offer the local community. I love meeting friends for coffee at Art & The Secret Garden Cafe and I regularly dine at Trio with my family. There is plenty of green belt land for me to walk my little dog - Happy - and to meet other dog walkers, ramblers and young people enjoying the recreational areas.

Headingley has a huge variety of community services, it's close to beautiful countryside and has excellent links into the city - there's nowhere else I'd rather live!"

'Headingley and its Trams'
Alan Bennett - Author and Playwright
"After the war we moved to Far Headingley, where Dad, having worked all his life at the Co-op now has a shop of his own just below the tram-sheds opposite St Chad's. We live over the shop, so I sleep and wake to the sound of trams: trams getting up speed for the hill before Weetwood Lane, trams spinning down from West Park, trams shunted around the sheds in the middle of the night, the scraping of wheels, the clanging of the bell.

To be on a tram sailing down Headingley Lane on a fine evening lifted the heart. I went to school by tram, the fare a halfpenny from St Chad's to the Ring Road. A group of us at the Modern School scorned school dinners and came home for lunch, catching the tram from another terminus at West Park.

We were all keen on music and went every Saturday to hear the Yorkshire Symphony Orchestra in the Town Hall, and it was on a  tram at West Park that another sixth-former, 'Fanny' Fielder sang to me the opening bars of Brahm's Second Piano Concerto."

Alan Bennett, Writing Home, Faber & Faber, 1994
Copyright Forelake Ltd, 1994,1997
Image Copyright Alex Bailey, courtesy of History Boys Ltd