In search of Melville Street

I just about remember the Silver Jubilee of 1977. It was 25 years since the Queen's accession to the throne, and the country went nuts for it. I know people who grew up in ardent Welsh Nationalist families who had street parties with red white and blue bunting.

It is gratifying to note that nobody did anything much for the Golden Jubilee and most people here won't even have noticed it or be able to recall when it was without doing the maths in their head. I don't know how we can call ourselves democratic whilst giving power, wealth and respect to people because they're the vague descendants of thieves and murderers. I'm glad we're making them pay a bit of tax whilst we ignore them all the more.

I always assumed that the Jubilee Social Club in Woodhouse got its name from being built in 1977. It certainly looks like a chunk of unimaginative functional 70s architecture. But now I'm guessing that it's a nod to Jubilee road, Street, Mount and Terrace that used to stand nearby, where the Elthams now stand.

The Jubilee Social Club is built on the site of several stumpy rows of terraces perpendicular to Melville Place; the end of Melville Street, and Viscount Street, Viscount Place and Viscount Terrace. So it would have been more accurate to call it the Viscount Social Club, but I suspect so aristocratic a name sat uneasily with working mens' club sensibilities.

For those unfamiliar, the bits of Leeds built in the 19th century tend to have groups of street names. You'll get Brudenell Road, Street, Mount, Avenue, View and Grove all adjacent.

This method has it's pros and cons. It's awful if you're trying to remember it, (did they say it was Brudenell Mount? Or Grove? er...), but it also makes a neat subdivision of areas, so you refer to someone living in 'The Brudenells' and because you've seen so many streets you get the idea without having to have a precise knowledge.

Incidentally, 'Brudenell' always sounds like mild or archaic swearing to me, as in 'what the brudenell do you think you're doing?'

There is another Leeds convention, cross streets. So you'll get Louis Street and then a narrower street perpendicular to it is called Cross Louis Street.

The main road from Hyde Park Corner through Woodhouse down to Meanwood Road is called Woodhouse Street at the start, for obvious reasons. But as it passes the Chemic it becomes Melville Road, then for the last bit after the junction with Melville Place it becomes Cross Chancellor Street. Makes me picture Alistair Darling with a real mardy face.

That's because the sharp right turn at the Chemic is the rest of Woodhouse Street. The road as we know it today is the result of the demolition and remodelling of that lower part of Woodhouse. We still have Cross Speedwell Street, even though Speedwell Street has gone.

The new houses built on the Melvilles were given names in the series - Melville Close and Gardens, as is the case with the new Marian Terrace on the site of the Marians.

The Chemic on Johnston Street gets its name from Johnston's Chemical Works that stood on the street. It was demolished in about 1890 according to one source, though I'm sure I read somewhere else it was 1920 (using 'I'm sure' in that sense that means 'I'm not sure'). The Marians were subsequently built on the site. This is why the Marians are newer than the surrounding terraces.

A picture from 1959 shows houses on Johnston Street looking like the same sort of sandstone buildings as the Chemic. The older buildings all along the Meanwood valley are easily distinguished by their sandstone, presumably from the sandstone quarries that were on either side of the valley in the early 19th century.

This whole area between Woodhouse Street and Meanwood Road, around the Melvilles and Marians, is marked on the mid 19th century map as open land called Woodhouse Carr (a carr being marshy or boggy moor). The name is still on modern maps, though I've never heard anybody use it.

It seems as if the majority - literally - of Woodhouse is not the original buildings. Much of it appears to have been demolished and redeveloped in the 60s and 70s. The fabulous Leodis archive has that picture of the house Mary Gawthorpe was born and brought up in, but it is not at all easy to locate it on the ground. A few streets are in the same place, others have had their course changed and a great many have been erased entirely.

I've done a bit of a rudimentary calculation (looking at the 1908 Ordnance Survey map whilst having Google Earth up on screen with a ruler!), and it appears that 5 Melville Street was just inside the entrance to Melville Gardens. Walk in from Melville Place on the right, and as the pavement starts to curve right for the first cul-de-sac, you're stood on 5 Melville Street. I think.

The 10 Rillington Place site has some thunderously impressive research. It faces the same sort of problem, ie that the whole area has been remodelled and bears no relation to the original. But with diligence, maps and Photoshop they figured it out.

I'll scan a modern map of Woodhouse Carr and do an overlay of it with the 1908 one so we can see it clearly.

21 Estcourt Avenue photos

The house George Orwell stayed in is a through terrace.

Front:



Back:

7 March 1936

Staying till next Wed. with M[arjorie] and H[umphrey] at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley. Conscious all the while of difference in atmosphere between middle-class home even of this kind and working-class home. The essential difference is here there is elbow room, in spite of there being 5 adults and 3 children, besides animals, at present in the house.

Mary Gawthorpe postcards

After moves to make the Womens Social and Political Union democratically open and write a constitution were literally torn up by Emmeline Pankhurst in 1907, there was something of a ruling elite feeling among its prime movers and paid employees. Mary Gawthorpe was one of these generals.

The WSPU published sets of postcard portraits of their committee of leaders.

For reasons that I can't quite be bothered to fathom, there's a suffragettes section on the UK Parliament site's bit about the Life Peerages Act 1958, and it includes scans of a vintage set of eight postcards.

This is only the second picture of her I've found so far.



The same picture was used on a different postcard.

Mary Gawthorpe picture

The most common picture of Mary Gawthorpe - from 1909ish - is often used only in a cropped form, which is a great shame as in its fullness it is a wonderful photograph.

The recline of the pose is unlike the starchy formal posture common to portraits of the era, and that hint of a smirk set underneath the determination of the eyes makes it utterly captivating.

"Miss Gawthorpe is a morsel of a woman to have achieved so much, but one look into her hazel eyes - her very unusual hazel eyes - is convincing of the power within her. She is all fire and quick response, a flash of energy, of sympathy, of comprehension."
-Mary Ogden White

Orwell's Leeds diary

The Leeds section of George Orwell's 1936 Road To Wigan Pier diary initially concentrates on his experiences in Sheffield, but then moves on to his stay in Headingley. He was a bugger for very long paragraphs, which are difficult to read on-screen, so I've added some paragraph breaks.

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5 March

At 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley, Leeds. I left Sheffield at 10.30 this morning, and in spite of its being such a frightful place and of the relief of getting back into a comfortable house, I was quite sorry to leave the Searles. I have seldom met people with more natural decency. They were as kind to me as anyone could possibly be, and I hope and trust they liked me. Of course I got their whole life-history from them by degrees.

Searle is 33 and was an only child. When a youth he joined the Army and was in the Ordnance Corps (or whatever it is called) with the army of occupation in Palestine and Egypt. He has vivid memories of Egypt and wishes he was back there. Since then he has only had short-lived jobs, e.g. as store-keeper and check-weighman at various works, also as railway (outside) porter.

Mrs S comes from a somewhat more prosperous family, as her father till only a few weeks ago36 (36 He died very suddenly and his wife has now no resources except the old age pension [Author's footnote) was in a good job at £5 a week and also made something on the side by making fishing rods. But it was a very large family (11) and she went into service. She married S when he was on the dole, against the opposition of her family. At first they could not get a house, and lived in a single room, in which two children were born and one died. They told me they had only one bed for the family and had to 'lay out' the dead baby in the perambulator.

Finally, after frightful difficulty (one reason for this is that private landlords are not too keen on letting to people on the dole and there is a certain amount of bribery of agents) they got this house, of which the rent is about 8s. 6d. Mrs S earns about 9s. a week from her charing. Exactly what deduction is made for this from S's dole I don't know, but their total income is 32s. 6d. In spite of which I had great difficulty in getting them to accept enough for my keep while there - they wanted to charge only 6s. for full board and lodging from Monday night to Thursday morning.

They keep the house very clean and decent, have a bit of garden, though they can't do much with it, as it has factory chimneys on one side and the gas works on the other, besides being poor soil, and they are very fond of one another. I was surprised by Mrs S's grasp of the economic situation and also of abstract ideas - quite unlike most working-class women in this, though she is I think not far from illiterate. She does not seem resentful against the people who employ her - indeed she says they are kind to her - but sees quite clearly the essential facts about domestic service. She told me how the other day as she waited at the lunch table she calculated the price of the food on the table (for 5 persons for one meal) and it came to 6s. 3d. - as much as the P.A.C. allows her child for a fortnight.

B was very good and took my request to 'show me over Sheffield' even too seriously, so that from morning to night I was being rushed from place to place, largely on foot, to see public buildings, slums, housing estates etc. But he is a tiresome person to be with, being definitely disgruntled and too conscious of his Communist convictions. In Rotherham we had to have lunch at a slightly expensive restaurant because there didn't seem to be any others except pubs (B is T.T.), and when in there he was sweating and groaning about the 'bourgeois atmosphere' and saying he could not eat this kind of food.

As he declares that it is necessary to literally hate the bourgeoisie, I wondered what he thought of me, because he told me at the very start I was a bourgeois and remarked on my 'public school twang'. However, I think he was disposed to treat me as a sort of honorary proletarian, partly because I had no objection to washing in the sink etc. but more because I seemed interested in Sheffield. He was very generous and though I had told him at the start that I was going to pay for his meals etc. while we were together, he would always go out of his way to spare me expense.

It seems that he lives on 10s. a week - I had this from Searle: exactly where B's 10s. comes from I don't know - and the rent of his room is 6s. Of course it would not be possible to subsist on the remainder, allowing for fuel. You could only keep alive on 4s. a week if you spent nothing on fuel and nothing on tobacco or clothes.

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Orwell kept a newspaper cutting among his notes:

News of The World, 1 March 1936

LIVING on 4s. A WEEK: MAN'S DESCRIPTION OF HOW HE DOES IT.

Following the disclosures in the News of the World of parent who have to bring up big families on tiny incomes, a correspondent draws our attention to the case of a man who spends less than 4s. a week on food.

His week's supply and its cost is as follows:-
3 Wholemeal loaves 1/0
½ lb. Margarine 2½d
½ lb. Dripping 3d
1lb. Cheese 7d
1lb. Onions 1½d
1lb. Carrots 1½d
1lb Broken biscuits 4d
2lb. Dates 5d
1 Tin evaporated milk 5d
10 Oranges 5d

Total cost 3/11 ½

The man, Mr W Leach of Lilford Road, London SE, adds that he would prefer to boil the carrots to eating them raw 'but, of course, to boil the water would cost too much'.

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I gather B gets meals from time to time from the Ss and other friends, also from his brother who is in comparatively good employ. His room is decent and even cultured-looking, as it has bits of 'antique' furniture which he has made himself, and some crude but not disagreeable pictures, mostly of circuses, which he has painted.

Much of his bitterness obviously comes from sexual starvation. His deformity handicaps him with women, his fear of transmitting it has stopped him from marrying (he says he would only marry a woman past the childbearing age), and his inability to earn money makes it more impossible still. However, at one of the Adelphi summer schools he picked up with some school-mistress (aged 43) who I gather is his mistress when opportunities permit and who is willing to marry him, only her parents oppose it. The Searles say he has improved greatly since taking up with this woman - before that he used to have fits occasionally.

We had an argument one evening in the Searles' house because I helped Mrs S with the washing-up. Both of the men disapproved of this, of course. Mrs S seemed doubtful. She said that in the North working-class men never offered any courtesies to women (women are allowed to do all the house-work unaided, even when the man is unemployed, and it is always the man who sits in the comfortable chair), and she took this state of things for granted, but did not see why it should not be changed. She said that she thought the women now-a-days, especially the younger women, would like it if men opened doors for them etc.

The position now-a-days is anomalous. The man is practically always out of work, whereas the woman occasionally is working. Yet the woman continues to do all the house-work and the man not a hand's-turn, except carpentering and gardening. Yet I think it is instinctively felt by both sexes that the man would lose his manhood if, merely because he was out of work, he became a 'Mary Ann'.

One particular picture of Sheffield stays by me. A frightful piece of waste ground (somehow, up here a piece of waste ground attains a squalor that would be impossible even in London), trampled quite bare of grass and littered with newspaper, old saucepans etc. To the right an isolated row of gaunt four room houses, dark red, blackened by smoke. To the left an interminable vista of factory chimneys, chimney behind chimney, fading away into a dim blackish haze. Behind me a railway embankment made from the slag of furnaces. In front, across the piece of waste ground, a cubical building of dingy red and yellow brick, with the sign, 'John Grocock, Haulage Contractor'.

Other memories of Sheffield: stone walls blackened by smoke, a shallow river yellow with chemicals, serrated flames, like circular saws, coming out from the cowls of the foundry chimneys, thump and scream of steam hammers (the iron seems to scream under the blow), smell of sulphur, yellow clay, backsides of women wagging laboriously from side to side as they shove their perambulators up the hills....

7 March

Staying till next Wed. with M[arjorie] and H[umphrey] at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley. Conscious all the while of difference in atmosphere between middle-class home even of this kind and working-class home. The essential difference is here there is elbow room, in spite of there being 5 adults and 3 children, besides animals, at present in the house. The children make peace and quiet difficult, but if you definitely want to be alone you can be so - in a working-class house never, either by night or day.

One of the kinds of discomfort inseparable from a working man's life is waiting about. If you receive a salary it is paid into your bank and you draw it out when you want it. If you receive wages, you have to go and get them in somebody else's time and are probably kept hanging abo0ut and probably expected to behave as though being paid your wages at all was a favour. When Mr H at Wigan went to the mine to draw his compensation, he had to go, for some reason I did not understand, on two separate days each week, and was kept waiting in the cold for about an hour before he was paid. In addition the four tram journeys to and from the mine cost him 1s., reducing his compensation from 29s. weekly to 28s. He took this for granted, of course.

The result of long training in this kind of thing is that whereas the bourgeois goes through life expecting to get what he wants, within limits, the working man always feels himself the slave of a more or less mysterious authority. I was impressed by the fact that when I went to Sheffield Town Hall to ask for certain statistics, both B and Searle - both of them people of much more forcible character than myself - were nervous, would not come into the office with me, and assumed that the Town Clerk would refuse information. They said, 'He might give it to you but he wouldn't give it to us'.

Actually the Town Clerk was snooty and I did not get all the information I asked for. But the point was that I assumed my questions would be answered, and the other two assumed the contrary.

It is for this reason that in countries where the class hierarchy exists, people of the higher class always tend to come to the front in times of stress, though not really more gifted than the others. That they will do so seems to be taken for granted always and everywhere.

N.B. to look up the passage in Lissagary's History of the Commune describing the shootings after the Commune had been suppressed. They were shooting the ringleaders without trial, and as they did not know who the ringleaders were, they were picking them out on the principle that those of better class than the others would be the ringleaders. One man was shot because he was wearing a watch, another because he 'had an intelligent face'. N.B. to look up this passage.

Yesterday with H and M to Haworth Parsonage, home of the Brontes and now a museum. Was chiefly impressed by a pair of Charlotte Bronte's cloth-topped boots, very small, with square toes and lacing up the sides.

9 March

Yesterday with H and M to their cottage at Middlesmoor, high up on the edge of the moors. Perhaps it is only the time of year, but even up there, miles from any industrial towns, the smoky look peculiar to this part of the country seems to hang about anything. Grass dull-coloured, streams muddy, houses all blackened as though by smoke. There was snow everywhere, but thawing and slushy. Sheep very dirty - no lambs, apparently. The palm was out and primroses putting out new shoots; otherwise nothing moving.

11 March

On the last two evenings to 'discussion groups' - societies of people who meet once a week, listen to some talk on the radio and then discuss it. Those at the one on Monday were chiefly unemployed men and I believe these 'discussion groups' were started or at any rate suggested by the Social Welfare people who run unemployed occupational centres.

That on Monday was decorous and rather dull. Thirteen people including ourselves (one woman besides M) and we met in a room adjoining a public library. The talk was on Galsworthy's play The Skin Game and the discussion kept to the subject until most of us adjourned to a pub for bread and cheese and beer afterwards.

Two people dominated the assembly, one a huge bull-headed man named Rowe who contradicted whatever the last speaker has said and involved himself in the most appalling contradictions, the other a youngish, very intelligent and extremely well-informed man named Creed. From his refined accent, quiet voice and apparent omniscience, I took him for a librarian. I find he keeps a tobacconist's shop and was previously a commercial traveller. During the war he was imprisoned as a conscientious objector.

The other meeting was at a pub and the people were of higher standing. The arrangement is that M and H go there taking the portable radio, and the publican, who is a member of this group, lets them have a room for the evening. On this occasion the talk was called 'If Plato Lived Today', but no one listened-in except M and myself - H has gone to Bedford.

When the talk was over the publican, a Canadian with a very bald head, a market gardener who was already the worse for drink, and another man rolled in and there began an orgy of drinking from which we escaped with difficulty about an hour later.

Much of the talk on both nights about the European situation and most people saying (some of them with ill-dissembled hope) that war is certain. With two exceptions all pro-German.

Today to Barnsley to fix up about a place to stay. Wilde, secretary of the South Yorkshire Branch of the Working Men's Club and Institute Union, has fixed it all up for me. The address is Agnes Avenue. The usual 2 up 2 down house, with sink in living room, as at Sheffield. The husband is a miner and was away at work when we got there. House very disorganized as it was washing day, but seemed clean.

Wilde, though kind and helpful, was a very vague person. He was a working miner till 1924 but as usual has been bourgeois-ified. Smartly dressed with gloves and umbrella and very little accent - I would have taken him for a solicitor from his appearance.

Barnsley is slightly smaller than Wigan - about 70,000 inhabitants - but distinctly less poverty stricken, at any rate in appearance. Much better shops and more appearance of business being done. Many miners coming home from the morning shift. Mostly wearing clogs but of a square-toed pattern different from the Lancashire ones.

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On 25 March, Orwell closes his diary with, 'Returning to Leeds tomorrow, then on to London on Monday'. This gave him a further four days in Leeds, though there is no record from that visit.

Mary Gawthorpe, 5 Melville Street

A Leeds 6 double-whammy here - not only a local hero but a major local event.

Mary Gawthorpe (January 12 1881-March 12 1973) was a militant suffragette born and brought up at 5 Melville Street, Woodhouse. She organised and addressed perhaps the largest rally Woodhouse Moor has ever seen, a suffragette demonstration over 100,000 strong on 26 July 1908.

The rich pictorial treasure trove, Leodis, has a picture of her house which, like much of lower Woodhouse, was demolished circa 1970. Her family was political with her father being - eek - the political agent for the local Conservative MP.

She won a scholarship to high school, but the family's poverty meant she was taken on as a pupil-teacher. She became a professional teacher, and her Socialist convictions led her to work for the National Union of Teachers, leading a campaign for school meals.

She attended the local Labour Church (whatever that was), and met TB Garrs, a socialist journalist for a local newspaper. From here, she ended up editing the womens page of Labour News.

In 1906 she became a full time organiser for the Womens Social and Political Union. Like many in the movement, she was arrested several times and imprisoned.

There was a mass demonstration in London’s Hyde Park on ‘Womens Sunday’, Sunday 21 June 1908, addressed by Mary Gawthorpe. Drawing a crowd of quarter of a million, it was one of the largest demonstrations the country had ever seen.

Manchester suffragist Helena Swanwick described Mary as having a ‘big fog-and-frost’ voice. Mary was a teacher; a militant suffragette; from Yorkshire. Any one of these is likely to give someone a strong declarative tone. The combination of all three must have been like an oratory blacksmith at work.

After the huge success of London, Mary went to Manchester to implement some successor rallies. She started with that city less than a month later, addressing a rally of 150,000 at Heaton Park on 19 July. A week later she moved on to a park she probably knew better than any other.

One can only imagine the particular excitement she must have had coming to Woodhouse Moor. It was not just her home town but her childhood neighbourhood. Standing on the Moor overlooking the streets she grew up on, Mary Gawthorpe addressed a crowd of 100,000.

In 1909 she heckled Winston Churchill and was badly beaten by his bouncers. After she retired from the WSPU in 1911 due to ill health (I get the impression it was activist burnout), she teamed up with Dora Marsden to co-edit The Freewoman magazine. Whilst it drew submissions from such luminaries as HG Wells and Ezra Pound, it was nonetheless avowedly radical. Not only did it have a strong feminist line and counselled women not to marry, but it advocated free love and tolerance of homosexuality and suggested communal childcare and co-operative housekeeping.

The WSPU Women's Press published a pamphlet by Mary called Votes For Men, in late 1907 or early 1908 I think.

Strangely, she published a completely different - and hilarious - pamphlet with the same name in America in 1913. A specialist publisher in Montana reprinted that one last December.

She emigrated to New York in 1916, and immediately became an agitator and organiser. She continued to show her joined-up political thinking campaigning for a range of social justice issues in the feminist and labour spheres, ending up working full time as a union official.

She belatedly published her autobiography of her childhood and early adult years up until her imprisonment in 1906, Up Hill To Holloway, in 1962. Only 6000 were printed, it's long out of print and the only copy I can find is 300 quid. Sheesh.

After her death her relatives left her papers to an archive in New York who provide an online inventory but sadly not the documents themselves. They do have an excellent potted history of Mary's life in the 'biographical note' section, though.

George Orwell, 21 Estcourt Avenue

Everyone knows 1984 and Animal Farm, but for me it's George Orwell's non-fiction that gives us the most insight and value. Open the mighty four-volume Collected Essays Letters and Journalism at any page and you'll find a line that slaps your mind. A more select book of Essays should be standard reading for anyone of conscience.

George Orwell's older sister, Marjorie Dakin, lived at 21 Estcourt Avenue, Headingley (Google map).

Orwell stayed with the Dakins for a week (5-13 March 1936) between his visits to Sheffield and Barnsley on his travels researching The Road To Wigan Pier, and again after Barnsley before his return to London (26-30 March 1936).

He typed up an lengthy lot of notes not only about his experiences in Wigan, Sheffield etc, but also about what he found and did in Leeds. This document was found among his papers after his death. It is now held in the extensive Orwell Archive at University College London Library.

He talks of visiting a local pub for a political discussion group (sadly he doesn't say which one). During the visit they went to Haworth and the Bronte parsonage, and stayed at Humphrey and Marjorie's cottage nearby at Middlesmoor.

The Left Book Club commissioned Orwell to write reportage of life for working class people in Northern industrial towns. In The Road To Wigan Pier, they got considerably more than they bargained for. Not only was their Orwell's characteristic clarity of style and compassion in the face of injustice, but along with the journalism and social analysis was a hefty section considering the socialist movement in Britain, much of it uncomplimentary.

Ruffling feathers never bothered Orwell much at any time, but less so with this. Despite it being his best selling book by far, he its reception as he went off to fight with the POUM militia in the Spanish Civil War.

According to the chronology appendix in his Collected Essays Letters and Journalism Volume 1, he sent off the finished manuscript on 15 December 1936 and had left for Spain by Christmas. The book was published on 8 March 1937 and Orwell returned home in early July.

I remember reading that it was by quite some distance his biggest selling book at the time. As the Left Book Club was a subscription thing, there was a guaranteed readership. If memory serves, there were about 35,000 sold, compared to the low thousands for everything else before Animal Farm came out in 1945.

Marjorie Dakin (nee Blair, presumably) was married to Humphrey Dakin. They had three children. She died on 3 May 1946, aged 48, of a kidney disease and the funeral was in Nottingham.

The Road To Wigan Pier Diary was published in An Age Like This 1920-1940: The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters volume 1, 1968 (reprinted by Penguin in 1993, and by David R Godine, 2007). It is most readily available in Orwell's England, which has the full text of Road To Wigan Pier along with the other writings that contextualise it. Read the illuminating introduction to Orwell's England here.

The full text of The Road to Wigan Pier (but not the diary) is online here.

What is This Blog?

Last December I met a friend in the Chemic in Woodhouse. We started talking about the snippets of history we knew about the area.

She has a print of the entry to Royal Park Gardens, a pleasure gardens that stretched down from Hyde Park Road between Royal Park Road and Brudenell Road.

Hyde Park once hosted a massive Suffragette rally.

She had a chart from the 17th century that shows the stone stepped mounting block beside the A660 in Hyde Park. That means that if you stand there, despite the huge view, it is the oldest structure you can see.

I chipped in - George Orwell stayed in Estcourt Avenue whilst researching Road To Wigan Pier. Henry Rollins lived in the Harolds. The air raid shelter under Hyde Park still has paint on the walls saying which side is for men and which for women. The pub we were sat in took its name from the chemical works that used to stand beside it.

We were really enthused and thought we should research things more with a view to doing a pamphlet. A history of Hyde Park (the district not just the park, though the park should be seen as a sort of spiritual centre of the area) and it should have something of a radical slant.

Well, it's six months later and there's no real work been done.

But I thought if I start this blog, I can just tip my notes and findings on to it so things are useful immediately without waiting for a publication to be finished. Also, it means others can leave comments and fill in gaps or correct errors.

So, it's not meant to be definitive or authoritative, but a way of putting down what I've found so far and what the questions niggling me are.

I'll stray further away from the park if what I've found is interesting enough or undocumented enough. It's arbitrary. I'll go as far as Estcourt Avenue for George Orwell, but not all the way up to Far Headingley for Alan Bennett.