The Statues of Woodhouse Moor

Four statues stand on Woodhouse Moor, but none of them were originally placed there.

At the corner of Moorland Road and Clarendon Road stands the Duke of Wellington, always with his boots creatively repainted, and as I write he's currently sporting a Homer Simpson mask.



Homer with a poncey hat and that puffed up pomposity of 18th century aristocrats. Great.

At the opposite side of the park by Hyde Park Corner stands Robert Peel. He too has been reinterpreted. For the Euro 2004 football tournament he got England flag facepaint, and after the death of John Peel the inscription 'Peel 1852' was painted to say 'John Peel 1939-2004'.



The miserablist council scrubbed it off, but it returned. By my count, it's been redone eleven times. And if you stood there and asked the citizens of the creative haven of Leeds 6 who they'd prefer - the inventor of the Conservative party and the police, or the man who brought us Jimi Henrix and The Clash - I know what answer you'd get.

Disrespect of statues is nothing new, nor is it limited to Woodhouse Moor. There was a great hoo-hah about disrespect when a Mayday demo gave London's Churchill statue a grass mohican, but that was anomalous. It goes off all the time without comment. It's seems like more common to see Cardiff's statue of NHS godfather Aneurin Bevan with a traffic cone on his head than without.

And frankly, I suspect that we subconsciously know that the people we erect statues to - largely our overwealthy and brutal ancestors - need taking down a peg or two, so we have them publicly shat on in effigy by pigeons.

But anyway, collectively the four statues of Woodhouse Moor spell out another form of disrespect. Wellington, Victoria and Robert Peel originally stood in Victoria Square outside the town hall, but were moved in 1937 to make way for a car park.

The fourth is the only native of the city, the Victorian industrialist and mayor of Leeds Henry Marsden.



His statue gives the name to Monument Moor, the area of Woodhouse Moor on the other side of the A660 from Victoria.

It was called Swing Moor prior to Marsden's arrival in 1952, when he was moved there from the city centre road junction of Merrion Street and Albion Street as he was deemed to be a hindrance to the increasing amount of motor traffic.

So, we used to venerate these folks in the city centre, but we've sidelined them to a peripheral park in order to make way for increased traffic. Collectively, then, they stand as a monument to the motor car.

Their moving is not a sign that we've stopped venerating things, just a physical acknowledgement of the change in what we worship.