Ticket barriers: an unnecessary bane
Recently, Leeds station opened a new entrance on the south side, to great fanfare. I live on the north side of the station and lots of my favourite places to go out are on the south side. Wouldn’t it be nice, I thought while it was being built, to be able to walk through the station instead of around it? Well, sadly, that’s not possible thanks to Leeds being a so-called “gated” station, with ticket barriers at both entrances and no right of way between them. (And as if to rub salt in, they’re shortly closing the staircase that leads to the south side from the north entrance.) Isn’t Leeds station public land? It’s certainly owned by the taxpayer. Why is it that I can’t walk across a huge public building to get from...
Leeds Tube map v3
Update: you can now buy the Leeds Tube map as a poster for your wall! My Tube map has been getting a lot of attention recently. I’ve twice been on BBC Radio Leeds to talk about it, it’s been shared (uncredited) on the Facebook pages of O2 Academy and Trinity Leeds, and a version of it (bizarrely) appears in public transport app Moovit. So it’s high time for a little update. This version joins the Abbey Line and Skyrack Lines in Otley, and adds the two planned National Rail stations at Apperley Bridge and Kirkstall Forge. It also fixes the shape of the East Circle, which has been bugging me since I made version 2. As usual, it’s released under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license, which means you can use it for any...
Rivers of Yorkshire
When I think about the locations of towns and cities in Yorkshire, I tend to think in terms of the railway maps. This gives a distorted view that connects Leeds with Huddersfield and Shipley with Ilkley. A more geographically sensible way to look at things would be to think in terms of the major rivers of Yorkshire. In school I remember learning “SUNWACD” as a mnemonic for remembering the order in which major rivers drain into the Ouse but I didn’t have a good visual picture of how they were laid out. So this afternoon I spent some time drawing a public-transport-style map of the major rivers in Yorkshire, and settlements along them. There’s no strong logic to which rivers and settlements I chose: they’re just based on my own...
Leeds Tube map updated
Update: you can now buy the Leeds Tube map as a poster for your wall! Hello visitors! See this update for v3 of the map! My Leeds Tube map was an unexpected hit on Twitter, and I even ended up being in the Yorkshire Evening Post! I also received some feedback from people who would like to see my fantasy tube support more of the population centres in Leeds. Some of the feedback was very constructive so I’ve taken the time to update it with two new lines, the East Circle, connecting settlements in East Leeds, and the West Line that connects Armley and Bramley with the rail network. I also updated the Google Map to show the real1 locations of these stations. View Leeds Tube in a larger map As before, this is released under an attribution-noncommercial licence,...
Leeds Tube map
Update: you can now buy the Leeds Tube map as a poster for your wall! Hello visitors! See this update! Leeds is an amazing city: my favourite place I’ve ever lived. But one thing it does really badly is public transport. We have one massive railway station in the centre of town and then (with a few exceptions) the rest of the city is accessible by unreliable, expensive and unpleasant First buses. As I have got to know the city better, one thing has kept coming back to me: wouldn’t it be amazing if Leeds had a metro system? So I imagined an alternate reality where the city I love has an amazing and reliable underground railway called Leeds Tube. Leeds Tube has several lines that connect the major population centres and attractions, including the...
Leeds Beer Quest
Regular readers of my blog (if such a thing exists) will notice it’s gone quiet here recently. I’ve not vanished, but I do have another project to keep me occupied! Emily and I are on a Leeds Beer Quest! We’re on a mission to visit every single pub and bar in Leeds city centre and review them. We’ve done 36 so far, which sounds like a lot, but we’ve got at least 140 to do! Check us out over there, especially if you live in Leeds and you’re looking for some ideas about new places to go out (or places to avoid). The address is pretty memorable: http://leedsbeer.info/ I’ve also not given up my commitments to Twitter and Flickr, and you can find me on those sites by following the links to the right hand side. I do have loads...
Leeds-based non-binary nerd and sewist. I won't break my streak on Duolingo for anyone. 
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