NEWSLETTER

September 2001

Dear HN members

You are now more numerous than ever before. Our failure to stop another pub being opened in Headingley had a surprising outcome. Firstly, it brought the community of Headingley together to express its anger at the way we are treated. We were on the Arndale Centre the first Saturday after the Crown Court case, and people were coming up, joining the Network and giving donations towards our costs – even though we’d failed! The donations continued to come in right through the summer and upto the middle of September. Our response to this level of support was to decide that the permanent community deserved something pleasant to happen for once, and we decided to hold the first ‘Celebrate Headingley’ event in the early weeks of September, partly to raise the money we needed to pay the court costs of the pub’s owners but mostly to get people together, doing things they enjoyed.

Celebrate Headingley - September 8th

For those of you who missed it, the event, on 8^th September, was a huge success. There was a cream tea and bazaar in the Methodist Hall in the afternoon, an early evening classical music recital in St Columba’s Church and an evening disco and band in St Michael’s Church Hall. All three events were buzzing with people and between them they attracted people of all ages who were happy to be at a community event with their friends and neighbours. We are very grateful to the Churches, who either waived or reduced their usual fees for this event in the interests of the wider community. Other organisations supported us in the form of stalls and donations, and the event as a whole made over £1500 profit! When we are in the position to pay the costs (£2500), we may ask for your practical help. Watch this space....

As for the Network’s continuing activities, we have decided to make our monthly committee meetings more productive by focusing on a single issue each month in addition to getting through the necessary business of the meeting. These meetings are open to all members (not the public unless we invite them!) and are held at 7.30 p.m. on the third Monday of each month at Headingley Community Centre in one of the small committee rooms upstairs. The committee will still have responsibility for taking crucial decisions about the Network’s activities, but we would be very happy indeed to see members joining in the specific campaigns that we hope to relaunch after the monthly meetings. In particular, we are looking for more members for the various campaign groups who report back to the committee, but who often continue their work fairly independently in the meantime.

The three meetings to be held before Christmas will be as follows:

• October 15^th  Traffic and Home Zones.

The traffic group has been very active on the issue of road closures and traffic calming in recent years. They would like to attract other members to work with them – particularly if you have a burning traffic issue in your street or neighbourhood. We are also hoping to launch at least one – possibly more – bids to create Home Zones in our area. Home Zones are residential roads or groups of roads that have special measures in place to make the streets safe for children and pleasant for adults to live in. There is money for these schemes – we want some!

• November 19^th ‘Celebrate Headingley!’

After the success of the first celebration of our community, which took only 6 weeks to organise, we will start building the basis of a bigger and even more inclusive event for next year. If you would like to help organise the next event, put bids in for financial support etc, this is the meeting to attend.

• December 17^th Planning and Pubs

Although the new pub is going ahead, and yet more family homes are being sold to landlords, we cannot afford to give up trying to make the authorities respond to our growing crisis. We can be more effective in monitoring the pubs and their customers if we have more people working on this issue. Please attend this meeting with your ideas and energy!

OTHER NEWS:

We now have our own noticeboard on the side of the Citrus Cafe on North Lane. It will have the latest news from the Network in it, so if you miss the meetings, keep an eye on the board! We also hope to launch a new website very soon, for the computer-minded amongst you – see below for details of the existing one.

A reminder of the committee members’ details can be found below. Please don’t hesitate to contact us with your views/ needs/ priorities. And thankyou once again for your support – despite it all, there is much worth celebrating in Headingley, not least the people!