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Rod McPhee: Vive la student revolution
WATCHING the streets refill with students over the past fortnight, the fortunes of Leeds haven't so much been revived as exhumed.
If ever there was proof of just how critical they are to the city it's those three long, barren months during the summer when the local economy takes a plunge.
And it's a huge plunge, the kind of plunge which, if it suddenly extended throughout the year, could prove cataclysmic. Make no mistake, Leeds would now be on its knees without students – they're one of our last remaining and most successful industries.
Estimates vary on numbers. Between Leeds University, Leeds Met and Trinity and All Saints College the number of people in higher education is somewhere around 60,000.
Bedrock
Take into consideration Leeds College of Music, the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, Leeds City College and all the rest and figures bound around of anywhere between 100,000 and 200,000, depending on whether you throw those in further education into the mix.
Which means that, even if we accept the more conservative guesses, at least one in seven people in Leeds are students, most of them from other parts of Britain, many from other parts of the world.
What's interesting is that the other six out of seven Loiners haven't quite absorbed this demographic seachange, they still view students as a conspicuous minority.
But ask anyone in the businesses they support – from pubs to pizza takeaways, laptop shops to taxi firms – and they'll tell you that students are an absolutely indisputable bedrock of the local economy.
And at the same time those who don't work within those businesses, or don't live in Hyde Park or Burley or Headingley, would probably never begin to think of Leeds as an industrial-city-turned-student-town.
Ask a Loiner which sector pumps millions into the Oxbridge economies and they'd probably answer "students", but they probably wouldn't think the same about their own city, even though our student population is probably bigger than that of Oxford or Cambridge.
It seems the expansion of higher education over the last 20 years has crept up on us like a silent revolution.
But something much more important has happened – they haven't just come here, they've stayed. Whenever, for example, I interview anyone who works in the bar trade, in clubs, in restaurants, in virtually any sector of entertainment and related service industries I've found that half – and I really do mean half – came here as students and loved it so much they put down roots.
So it isn't merely a transient flow of cash which floods back out on graduation, a sizeable amount of it arrives and remains here and in the process makes Leeds more attractive to more undergraduates – and so our economy snowballs.
I won't bleat on about the Steptoes in the 'burbs who continually complain about students because I genuinely get their beef and understand it. But I wonder if they understand that we now can't go back, and I wonder if they understand just how scuppered we'd be without students.
A turn for the better
FANTASTIC news as Leeds City Council make tentative enquiries into getting our own version of the London Eye.
They deserve a major pat on the back, assuming it actually happens. But just one question: why didn't they do this sooner?
To be fair one answer might be their experiences of the last time they did something similar by erecting a ferris wheel (one not quite as big) on Millennium Square.
A few years ago residents living in the adjacent apartments had to put up with hundreds of people passing by their windows peering in and, in a few unfortunate instances, pulling moonies.
And since pulling moonies is a God-given right of passage for any adolescent, the council have been shrewd in putting the wheel in the one place where you won't find many people – Clarence Dock.
Hopefully it will do the one thing the bosses of Leeds's showpiece shopping and leisure development haven't been able to do thus far and that's provide an impetus to leave the city centre's main shopping precinct and walk a mile into the industrial hinterland of south Leeds.
Of course the wheel probably won't happen straight away, but maybe that'll give Clarence Dock managers time to install some shops and places to eat which people will actually want to go into – that may take some time.
Concrete bungle
Meanwhile, I think the council have made a mammoth mistake tearing down Leeds International Swimming Pool in favour of yet more wasteland in which to leave our cars.
Tragically, only now as it's ripped apart do we get a complete view of the majestic space inside and some sense of the potential it could have offered to the city as a concert or exhibition venue.
It was also an important example of 1960s concrete design which, although not the most beautiful, had some architectural merits which could have been heightened.
But no, cavalier-style, they pull down the past and put up a
parking lot.
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Weather for Leeds
Saturday 26 May 2012
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Temperature: 8 C to 21 C
Wind Speed: 17 mph
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Temperature: 9 C to 22 C
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