Residents work together for Brickfield Park improvements

We were delighted to read about the announcement of £50,000 worth of spending due to take place on Brickfield Park over the next year, including play and exercise equipment, cycle tracks and seating areas.

We are a group of residents local to Brickfield Park on Lady Pit Lane, Beeston Hill who have been campaigning and calling for improvements to this park, since Leeds City Council announced that developments were a possibility (end of 2020).

With the help of Leeds Citizens and St Luke’s Cares we have organised a listening campaign which has helped to amplify the voices of people who live next to and use this park (or would like to use it!). We have worked with various Council represtatives to ask people what they like or don’t like about the park and what they would like to see happen in it.

We would really like to thank you if you contributed to this process. Whether this was filling in a questionnaire about the park, or speaking to one of our volunteers who knocked on your door. It’s really important that we as a community help to co-create our leisure spaces, our communities and indeed our city.

We especially want to thank Kidz Klub Leeds and the valuable contribution of the children who spent lots of time discussing and visiting this park. Kidz Klub leaders held focus groups with children to talk about what they enjoyed about it and would like to see there in the furure.

Children who participated attend local schools, and many of the children live in streets surrounding the park. A child who had done a photography project with Kidz Klub commented: “I enjoy looking at the view of the city from Brickfield Park.” It is a park that does have stunning views, and so hopefully these views can be enjoyed by many more people in the future.

The listening team also organised an Avtivity Day last summer and were assisted by James from Leeds Lets Get Active who helped run an orienteering course on the Park. Families attended and enjoyed the event and gave their opinion about what they felt should happen in the park.

Over the last two months ‘Park Play‘ has also happened in Brickfield Park, thanks to Karen Peck (Leeds Lets Get Active). Suriah and Tom, two play workers, have enthusiastically turned up every Saturday, whatever the weather, at 10:30am to lead team and ball games for local children.

They will continue to do this every Saturday throughout the next year. This activity is starting to be attended by local families as they hear about it, but the more the merrier – so please do come along.

Finally we would like to thank the various Council Representatives who diligently do their job of managing our Parks, and to Councillor Paul Wray for allocating Council funding to this venture. We do believe that we have together co-created something that will hopefully be enjoyed for a long time to come.

This has been the start of a powerful journey with local people helping shape the future of this park. There is still more to be done, unfortunately the park still has lots of dog waste in the grass, and litter can be a problem. So the group of residents that have started this campaign want to continue it by forming a ‘Friends of Brickfield Park’ Group and they need people who live near the park to join the group and help organise future events. If you are keen to be involved with this do get in touch with Neil Rhodes by emailing neilgrhodes@gmail.com

 

This post was written by Tania Carlisle

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