On the 21st August, the Yorkshire Evening Post published the following last minute plea from local community associations for the council to abandon its plan to create a barbeque area on Woodhouse Moor :

It is now over 5 months since Leeds City Council launched its plan to concrete part of Woodhouse Moor to create a barbeque area. This would install 40 large concrete blocks in the Moor at a cost of £20,000 and scrap the byelaw banning fires in a section of the park right next to the children’s playground and nearest people’s homes.

We are grateful to the YEP for its fair and balanced airing of the issues. However we now understand that the Council is about to announce its decision. We understand many YEP readers must wonder what all the fuss is about.

It’s very simple really. We love our park.

Woodhouse Moor, the city’s first public park, is a gift that one generation passes onto another. As the community most deprived of greenspace in Leeds we need a way to share this space with everyone. The Moor should be safe for dog walkers, joggers, picnickers, allotment holders, team sports, wildlife and young mums with a push-chair. It should not be an area where the selfish minority hold sway.

The scale of the vandalism we have witnessed both this summer and last is ruining the park for everyone. The litter, destroyed benches and picnic tables, bonfires, branch ripping, allotment raiding, drug taking, smashed glass, burned metal, noise, graffiti and tons and tons of dumped rubbish are not sustainable.

We have no confidence in the Council’s consultation exercise which has been a farce and fraud from the beginning.

We therefore ask the Council at the eleventh hour to safeguard this green treasure for all and not to appease vandalism with £20,000 of concrete and a turned blind eye.

As we now know, the community’s plea fell on deaf ears. I suppose it was too much to hope that the council would drop the plan now after going to the trouble of (1) excluding the community from the multi-agency meeting that gave rise to the plan, (2) changing the city’s byelaws to make barbeque areas possible, and (3) organising a biased consultation – all apparently so the plan could go ahead.