Metadata
WORK ID: YFA 3162 (Master Record)
| Title | Year | Date |
| FLOWERS FOR LEEDS | 1953 | 1953-01-01 |
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Details
Original Format: 16mm Colour: Colour Sound: Silent Duration: 14 mins 41 secs Credits: Photographed by ? John Eley Arthur Jellings Will Pearson Cyril Ramsden of the Leeds Camera Club Cine Circle Subject: Urban Life Architecture |
| Summary Flowers for Leeds is competition sponsored yearly by the Yorkshire Post in which a variety of residents in different postal districts take part in getting their gardens into the best order. This film takes a look at some of the contestants, and each house and gardener is identified by intertitles. |
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Description
Flowers for Leeds is competition sponsored yearly by the Yorkshire Post in which a variety of residents in different postal districts take part in getting their gardens into the best order. This film takes a look at some of the contestants, and each house and gardener is identified by intertitles.
The film opens with shots of well-tended gardens in the centre of Leeds with a bus going past.
Title - Hollin Park – Mr W. Penistone
81, Dib Lane
A woman wanders around the lawn, before...
Flowers for Leeds is competition sponsored yearly by the Yorkshire Post in which a variety of residents in different postal districts take part in getting their gardens into the best order. This film takes a look at some of the contestants, and each house and gardener is identified by intertitles.
The film opens with shots of well-tended gardens in the centre of Leeds with a bus going past.
Title - Hollin Park – Mr W. Penistone
81, Dib Lane
A woman wanders around the lawn, before close-ups of brightly coloured flowers. Two children are helping out in the garden and a man tends his patch with a hoe.
Title - Postal District 8 – Mrs L. Wilson
Well House Avenue
Many flowers are seen in a layered wall garden and in stone planters.
Title - Meanwood – Mrs R. Bury
158, Potternewton Lane
Next, the film shows a large house with well-kempt herbaceous borders.
Title - Postal District 7 – Mr A. Wilson
516, Street Lane West
Another garden is shown with a pergola and a fish pond that has koi carp in it.
Title - Moortown Estate – Mr G.E. Elsworth
A sign read “Deanwood Drive” and a number of cream-coloured houses can be seen. A butterfly flies past some geraniums.
Title - Ireland Wood – Mr G. Mackley
A sin reads “Iveson Crescent 6” and there is a brief look along the entire street. More brightly coloured flowers are shown close-up.
Title - This was one of a winning street group.
From a moving vehicle the camera pans along the street with the residents tending to their gardens as the car drives past. At the end of the street a man is setting up a tripod.
Title - Church Garden – St. Peter’s Hunslet
Next, the film shows men walking down the street where there is a shop advertising Capstan Cigarettes. A trolley bus goes past a Leeds City Transport sign and the church garden can be seen in the foreground.
Title - Two Small Gardens –
39, Back Colenso Road
29, Colwyn Road
A woman tends her flowers and cabbages in a small garden, before a shot of another garden with an ornamental well.
Title - Postal District 12 – Mr W. Norbury
There is a sign above an archway reading “Chatsworth Terrace” as a steam train goes past above the gardens. Some children run along the path past the allotment whilst a man in overalls tends his flowers.
Title - The Young Idea – at 1, North Hill Road
About a dozen children line up in front of a house to pose for the camera. All the children are then seen helping out in the garden with the flowers and vegetables.
Title - 43, Sissons Avenue
Middleton
Mr F.D. Boldy
Some children pose in front of a hedge, before shots of the greenhouse and a rockery.
Title - Cottage Flat Garden at Westfield
Mr. Dabycz
In this garden, heart shapes have been made using small stones.
Title - Greenthorpe – Mr S.L. Boulden
A woman tends to her flowers with a trowel in the garden, and there are shots of crazy-paving and a greenhouse.
Title - Quarry Hill Flats
A few pedestrians walk around in front of the flats.
Title - Garden Borders – Mr J. Unsworth
Moynihan House
Close-up shots show off the brutalist architecture of the flats and the flower gardens outside of them. A man in a waistcoat and flat cap tends his borders with a fork in front of a sign reading 9-14 Moynihan House. This is followed by a younger couple on a concrete balcony and a sign reading “23-30 Moynihan House”, where some children walk past pushing a pram.
Title - Window Boxes – Mrs O’Brien – a Great Grannie!
After a sign reading Moynihan House 71-79, the camera pans upwards to a window ledge where a grandma and two children look over the complex with a window box on the sill.
Title - Photographed by …
John Eley
Arthur Jellings
Will Pearson
Cyril Ramsden
of the Leeds Camera Club Cine Circle
Title - Film Commissioned by The Yorkshire Evening Post
The End
Title - But for You – The Beginning?
Context
This film is one of six films made of the Flowers For Leeds competitions covering the years 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1957. They were all made by members of the Leeds Camera Club Cine Circle for Yorkshire Post Newspapers, who sponsored the competition, in collaboration with the Flowers for Leeds Committee. In addition to those credited in this film, others also credited on other films are Cyril Ramsden’s wife, Betty, and Will Bennett. Cyril and Betty Ramsden operated as a husband and wife film...
This film is one of six films made of the Flowers For Leeds competitions covering the years 1952, 1953, 1955 and 1957. They were all made by members of the Leeds Camera Club Cine Circle for Yorkshire Post Newspapers, who sponsored the competition, in collaboration with the Flowers for Leeds Committee. In addition to those credited in this film, others also credited on other films are Cyril Ramsden’s wife, Betty, and Will Bennett. Cyril and Betty Ramsden operated as a husband and wife film team, with Betty often behind the camera, and were undoubtedly the star filmmakers in the cine club – and probably in the whole of West Yorkshire. There is much more on the Ramsdens and their extensive film collection in the Context for Humber Highway (1956). John (aka Jack) Eley also made an impressive collection of films held with the YFA – see the Context for Kelly's Eye (1972) – while Will Pearson is credited with the photography, editing and scripting of the film Old Leeds (1945), which suggests there may be others he made that haven’t turned up yet.
Information on the Flowers For Leeds competitions is hard to come by. It appears that it started in 1936, but it isn’t clear when it last ran – it may well have morphed into the current Leeds in Bloom competition (part of Yorkshire in Bloom and Britain in Bloom). The only online source is the excellent Leodis photographic archive for Leeds which hasn’t much information but states that: “The Yorkshire Evening Post met the costs of the administration and organisation for the competition, and funded the certificate and prize money to the value of £125.” The archive has a series of photographs from the 1951 Flowers For Leeds competition. Many of the houses that can be seen in the film, such as those on Dib Lane and Well House Avenue, seem to have changed remarkably little. Certainly, the house on Deanswood Drive on the Moortown Estate is still there, and those on Iveson Crescent – exactly the same type of house as on Deanswood Drive. These were in fact new houses at the time, built around 1950, although they were still being built into the 1960s. The aforementioned Leodis photographic archive has a nice photograph of the houses and some interesting posts from people who lived there at that time. These films certainly present a great historic record, with names and addresses of residents from the 1950s. Of particular interest is Moynihan House, one of thirteen blocks of flats, or ‘houses’, part of the Quarry Hill development, which began in the 1930s and which were ready for habitation by 1938. The houses were named after prominent people and they went round alphabetically – Jackson, Kitson, Lupton, Moynihan, Neilson, Oastler, Priestley, Rhodes, Saville, Thoresby, Victoria, Wright and York. Possibly the political make-up of Leeds Corporation, as it was then, was fairly progressive, as apparently the flats were modelled on the Karl Marx Hof flats in Vienna, built between 1927 and 1930 when it was known as Red Vienna (Rotes Wien), run by the Social Democrats, the first democratically elected authority there. The Karl Marx Hof flats were a very impressive housing project, with a fascinating history (see References). Their Leeds equivalent was the largest housing scheme in the country at the time; with solid fuel ranges, electric lighting, a refuse disposal system and communal facilities – see also the Context for Park Hill Housing Project (c.1962). However, the steel frame and concrete clad construction was unsafe and in 1978 the flats were demolished. The Leodis Archive has photos of the flats with many stories from those who lived there, as does the BBC (References). The inter-war growth of semi-detached houses was the single biggest boost to gardening for the less well-off. The passion for gardening part influenced, and was helped by, the fact that much, though certainly not all, housing in the UK has been built with more generously sized gardens than their continental counterparts. Inner City redevelopment between the wars led to an average 75 – 100 dwellings per hectare, while the average density for semi-detached houses with modest gardens is 30 per hectare. The growth of suburbia after the First World War has been dubbed as ‘ribbon-development’. In her fine survey of British social history, Francois Bédarida described this as, “interminable rows of little two storey houses all alike with brick walls, bow windows, little gardens full of rose bushes and neatly mown grass patches – a dull, narrow, restricted world.” (p. 232) But however dull this is, people on restricted incomes had little choice, and even dreamed of living in them as they afforded more space than a typical inner city terraced house. The hobby of gardening was helped by the continuance of British Summer Time once it began in 1916, and by reduced working hours. Jane Brown paints a bleak picture of housing after the second World War when there was less priority given to gardens than the inter-war period. Yet despite this, the slum clearances and the wave in house building following the war did help a boom in gardening – see the Context for In My Garden made in the same year as this. Gardening had for a long time been an important feature for the well-off, but was now taken up more widely by working class residents, usually in council housing, as these films testify. The growth of suburbia may well have influenced the making of the first television gardening programme to be broadcast in 1936, In Your Garden – although the war put a temporary stop to this. During the war many gardens were turned over to produce vegetables to make up for the shortage of food, and so after the war there was a renewed period of planting flowers and flowering plants. On 9th April 1947 the first Gardeners´ Question Time was broadcast – at that time called ‘How Does your Garden Grow?’ – and in 1950 Professor Alan Gemmell joined the panel to give the expert advice he provided for the next thirty years. For some reason the programme was confined to the Northern region until 1957, by which time Gardening Club had started in 1954. There were also several books published around this time aimed at those with a small garden. One such was Lanning Roper’s Successful Town Gardening, published in 1957. In addition there was also an increase in the publication of gardening magazines, such as Garden Work, The Garden, Home and Garden and My Garden: An Intimate Magazine for Garden Lovers, which run between 1934 and 1951. How much anyone read any of the books is hard to tell, though doubtless the magazines were popular. Nevertheless, the gardens that can be seen here show the influence of the horticulturalist experts, such as Gertrude Jekyll, in the use of colours and textures in their design. Garden competitions flourished after the war, and have continued, although not always in the same form. Finding information on the history of competitions of this kind, involving ordinary house gardens, is hard to come by – most histories of gardening tend to be of large or formal gardens, rather than of the type of gardening seen here, and have next to nothing to say on this social phenomena. Jane Brown’s book for example, despite being subtitled ‘A Social History of Gardens and Gardening’, has little on working class gardening . Leeds clearly led the way in this kind of competition, helping to bring gardening out of the preserve of the more affluent and into council estates. Even so, between 1948 and 1963 allotments in Leeds were reduced from 5,000 plots to 500, from 400 acres to 43. Leeds was also at the forefront of flower exhibitions, when, after letters in the Yorkshire Post, on 6 January 1911 the North of England Horticultural Society (NEHS) was inaugurated in the Lord Mayor's Rooms. It was out of this that the current Harrogate Flower Show emerged – following in the wake of the more famous Chelsea Flower Show. In fact the first Chelsea Flower Show wasn’t until 1913, although its predecessor, put on by the Royal Horticultural Society in Kensington, dates back to 1833. Now many places have ‘open garden days’, where anyone can wander around the private gardens participating, and there are now 50 local In Bloom groups across Leeds. With the huge variety of gardening magazines on offer, and a proliferation of gardening programmes on TV, gardening is clearly one of the most popular hobbies around. This despite the trend in new built houses to smaller gardens: a report by the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA) in 2011 condemned many new houses in the UK as being "shameful shoebox homes" and showed that the size of new homes in the UK is well below that of Ireland (15% bigger), Denmark (53% bigger) and Germany (80% bigger) – and shrinking. Yet a survey by the Alliance & Leicester in 2004, ‘MovingImproving’, shows that two-thirds of people looking to buy a house considered a garden to be among the main features sought, ranking higher than gas central heating, double-glazing, a garage or off-street parking. A review of leisure spending carried out by Halifax plc. in 2012 found that gardening was the only one of eleven activities studied that had not risen in cost more quickly than inflation. What is more, gardening figures high as a way of relieving stress. References Francois Bédarida, A Social History of England 1851-1990, Routledge, 2nd edition, 1991. Jane Brown, The Pursuit of Paradise: A Social History of Gardens and Gardening, HarperCollins, 1999. Joseph Rowntree Foundation Report, Preferences, quality and choice in new-build housing, 2004. Leodis, Leeds Photographic Archive Quarry Hill's History, BBC Leeds Karl Marx Hof flats Riba: The Case for Space 2011 Campaign to Protect Rural England: ‘Housing Density - can we get more homes without sacrificing the countryside?’ About the North of England Horticultural Society Leisure pursuit costs on the rise Why gardening is good for your health |
