Back when I lived in Leeds, its waterfront was emphatically not A Thing. It was certainly not called The Waterfront, being a disregarded area of town rotting behind the station, with long-closed mills and factories collapsing into weed-smothered decay. These dessicated buildings stood alongside ill-repaired streets, deserted except by cars whose owners parked here for free before scurrying off to work or shop in a more salubrious part of town. The River Aire, the Leeds-Liverpool Canal were uninviting, rubbish-clogged. The area wasn’t anybody’s idea of a good day out.
Nowadays, what a surprise! Mills and factories have been restored: repurposed as offices, shops, bars and restaurants. It’s busy day and night with local workers, tourists and pleasure-seekers. Canal boats saunter in and out. Here’s a woman enjoying a quiet moment, probably in her lunch break, on a bench overlooking the canal.
And here are members of a local art group, sketching the area in all its vibrancy one sunny August day. They seem to have commandeered all the benches-for-one.
For Jude’s Bench Challenge.
From Pyrenees to Pennines 
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