Last Sunday (12 October 2025) South Leeds paid unique tribute to one of Leeds’s most beloved and admired poets, Tony Harrison, who died at the end of September. Harrison was a Beeston-born poet and dramatist of national significance whose most famous (some might say notorious) work, V, is about Beeston and encapsulates many of the themes that recur throughout his life’s work.
Harrison’s work took in an extraordinary range from Aikin Mata, a reworking for Nigerian drama students of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata (a bawdy Greek play in which women declare a sex strike to end the war between Athens and Sparta), via an adaptation of a work by the 16th century French poet Racine, to a film Prometheus, described by Professor Edith Hall as “comparable with Shelley in its revolutionary power.”
London Review of Books and Slung Low brought three readings of ‘V’, first to Holbeck Cemetery, where it is, set and then to Slung Low, where it was followed by a panel discussion. The readings were organised with Tony’s input and after his unexpected death, they expanded beyond a marking of the 40th anniversary of the poem to become a wider celebration of his life and work and his connections to Leeds.
Sam Kinchin-Smith, head of special projects at the London Review of Books, said of ‘V’:
“Tony Harrison’s poem is a late 20th-century literary (and political) masterpiece, and described the readings as “a unique literary occasion, and a very special one: above all, a day of gratitude.”
The poem ‘V’ was written during the 1984–85 miners’ strike and became (in)famous in 1987 when it was broadcast on Channel 4, provoking an Early Day Motion in Parliament on Television Obscenity, with its frequent use of profanity leading it to be dubbed “a torrent of four-letter filth” – although very few viewers complained!
It is a many-layered poem, written in the aftermath of a visit Tony Harrison took to his parent’s grave in Holbeck Cemetery where he found racist and Leeds United graffiti, along with empty cans of Harp lager littering the grave. He imagines an angry exchange with the football fan who did the graffiti whilst drinking on his way home from a game at Elland Road. In often blunt language the poem broadens out to explore “industrial decline, class war, rampant xenophobia, inadequate political solutions, football and family, with Harrison savagely confronting his own social mobility in the process” acknowledging that, had it not been for his good fortune in winning a scholarship to a grammar school, he might have become a similarly frustrated, alienated and angry man.
After two summers of racist protests and attacks and with an increasingly hostile environment, hearing the poem out loud didn’t feel like listening to a poetic artefact from another time, but spoke to and reflected the same tensions and political failures today.
The readings were performed by a multi-racial cast of five, led by Kirklees-based actor-director, Barrie Rutter, with the audiences in the cemetery wearing headphones, seated and standing just metres from the grave of Tony’s parents.
The director of V. A Homecoming, Kully Thiarai said:
“As a working-class teenager growing up in the 80s much of what Harrison captures in ‘V.’ is a potent reminder of the world I had to navigate. Yet it seems as I read the poem now it demands our attention even more powerfully today, in a world where there is so much division and fear. I feel very privileged to be able to work on this presentation as part of the 40th anniversary and bring the poem back to where it started, enabling us all to look at how we might come together for a more hopeful future.”
Richard Burgon MP for Leeds East was in attendance and told us of his deep connection to V.
“V was brought to life by the performance we saw today. I did my university dissertation on Tony Harrison’s V…and the performance was so poignant and so moving. The poem V has so much social and political and economic and human relevance for now and I thought the performance today really brought that out. Tony passed recently and Leeds should celebrate his work more. He is a world renowned poet and dramatist and the huge attendance we saw today reflects that.”
Elaine, a former Beeston resident, told us what the performance meant to her:
“It was moving and thought-provoking to hear Harrison’s powerful poem V read in the setting of the graveyard which inspired it. Slung Low and London Review of Books brought the work home literally and emotionally today”.
Tony, director of Chapel FM community radio in Seacroft in Leeds told us:
“I moved to Leeds 7 years ago from Chicago and I remember in the months before coming here watching the film of V in the cemetery; Tony Harrison was for me the entry point for understanding so much about Leeds. Chapel FM have done screenings of his films and with this performance I can’t imagine a better way of thinking about him and paying tribute to him.”
Kully Thiarai and Alan Lane, the co-chairs of Slung Low wrote in the programme:
“For Slung Low, it is a privilege to be bringing this poem back home to the place that inspired it. And to honour a writer whose work demands us to think again, to seek the places where hope may reside, to better understand the world we live in and the hearts of those we live alongside”.
Beeston has had a difficult relationship with V over the years. It’s fair to say that some of us struggled initially with the image it presented of our often-scorned neighbourhood. We reconciled with it in a reading at Beeston Festival in 2013, and Harrison reconciled with us during his visit to the festival in 2014.
For those who heard it read on Sunday, on “Beeston Hill, your back to Leeds” it was an extraordinary, immensely moving, afternoon in LS11. It seemed that V had come full circle. And henceforth 12 October will be celebrated as ‘V day’. Here, and by everyone around the world who admires the work of the Bard from Beeston. V has come home.
A recording of the performance is due to be made available at www.slunglow.org from 1 November.
This post was written by Rebecca Townesend and Sue Talbot
Main Photo: Barrie Rutter reading V in Holbeck Cemetery
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