In his recent letter to the Yorkshire Evening Post (Readers’ Letters 15.5.09), Darrell Goodliffe claims that the existing byelaws restrict the “legitimate freedom” of people without gardens to have barbeques on Woodhouse Moor. For this reason, he supports the council’s proposal to allow barbeques on the Moor. Mr Goodliffe says that the damage caused by barbeques will be limited by restricting them to designated areas. But to those who point out that drifting smoke would interfere with other park users’ right to breathe unpolluted air, he has no answer. Instead, he suggests that if drifting smoke is a problem, then the opponents of the barbeque proposal should also be calling for barbeques in private gardens to be banned. In effect, he’s saying that having to breathe barbeque smoke in a park is no different to having to breathe it in your garden. But to compare barbeques in public parks with barbeques in private gardens is not comparing like with like. If the smoke from my neighbour’s barbeque is causing a nuisance, I can ask him to put it out. If he ignores my request, I have the remedy at law of taking out an injunction to prevent him having barbeques in the future. But if barbeques are legalised on Woodhouse Moor, if I asked someone having a barbeque there to extinguish it, they would be within their rights to tell me to go to one of the other Leeds parks where barbeques are still banned. And for the same reason, I would have no remedy at law.

Recently, on the Yorkshire Evening Post website, a lady from Ottawa commented that she lives close by to what used to be a lovely park. Then her local authority legalised barbeques. As a result, the only people who now visit the park, are those who go there to have a barbeque. The residents of Hyde Park, Woodhouse and Headingley are fighting this proposal so that everyone can continue to enjoy Woodhouse Moor, not just a selfish minority.

The above photograph was taken on the 12th May 2009 and shows the smoke pollution from just one barbeque. Multiply this by 40 to get an idea of the level of pollution that Leeds City Council considers acceptable on a park which when it was purchased in 1857 was known as “the lungs of Leeds”.