He could go and see Leeds Castle!
http://www.leeds-castle.com/land.php
(Note: this is a trap for foreigners; Leeds Castle, though very nice, is actually nowhere near Leeds.)
York is nice and within day-trip range. As are the Yorkshire Dales if you like that sort of thing.
Alex comes from that part of the world - paging Ranter!
Leeds is a city with two universities, a substantial finance sector and all the usual amenities, but damned if I know where e.g. the right place to eat this week is. You might be better off going to York (picturesque but overrun with tourists) or Howarth, if you're that way inclined.
Lee D leads with ledes about Leeds.
Deedly dee deedle dee.
"Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo."
I've only been there a couple of times for work, and didn't see much of it, but Leeds, by reputation at least, is fairly swanky. Fancy bars, clubs, etc. A friend who works for a big 'City' consultancy and was sent north for work came back shocked to find it wasn't all poverty and dirt north of Watford Gap.
Isn't Hogwarts up around there someplace?
Hogwarts is clearly up in ttaM's ancestral homeland somewhere.
I think Leeds I think . . . Gang of Four.
8, 10: I think of The Who. Live! Though the album apparently follows some variant of Moore's Law and doubles in length every time it gets re-released.
Hogwarts is clearly up in ttaM's ancestral homeland somewhere.
Given it's also Rowling's ancestral homland, that's a fair assumption. Leeds is all right without being grippingly exciting unless you know it well (You could say the same of Sheffield, 40 miles south, although Sheffield's always had the better music scene for some reason). Best thought of as a place to stay and go out to look at stuff from.
11.last: Holy shit, I had no idea.
9: Maybe the joke is that the real Knifecrime Island is like Iceland or something?
You really don't want to go to Hull though, Who or no Who. Rustbelt on sea without the facilities.
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"The manager at Costa Coffee just let 15-20 kettled protesters in and then out the back door to get away from cops. Fair play!"
Yay Costa Coffee! If only it was drinkable...
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Bring your dancing shoes, and some sort of waterproof jacket. Leeds parties, and rains. I recommend that you avoid the places in the so-called "office quarter" (either dull, or mean) and keep near the rail and river along the Calls. I'm afraid that any specific nightlife recommendations of mine will be badly out of date. (Although I think the HiFi is still going!)
Certainly go to Whitelock's Luncheon Bar on Turk's Head Yard off Briggate. There are a lot of good pubs and a few to stay out of. The Big Issue northern edition is a surprisingly great listings service.
There are a *lot* of students, for good or ill. Don't miss the Henry Moore museum next to the City Gallery. South of the River Aire it gets industrial and occasionally rough fast. Watch out for Leeds United football fans on match days, they can be trouble.
Get a Metrocard or whatever it's called now - all the buses and trains you can eat (worth having as you can get a train to anywhere in the north from there).
If I were in Leeds, I would go 10 miles west to Bradford and go to the 1 in 12 Club and never leave.
It's really not all that, although I can see why the concept attracts you.
'Course if I had to choose a UK city to move to, it'd be Glasgow, not Leeds. I don't think that's just bias on my part. I've yet to live anywhere else in the UK that's a congenial to people who like music, drinking, and aren't rich.
I haven't lived in Leeds since 1970, so anything I've actually experienced is appallingly out of date. It's too bad this comes after Guy Fawkes night. There used to be some pubs in Hunslet that had awesome bonfires.
I assume the Dales are still good and you can still go to the Bronte's place, stand out on the moor and yell "Heathcliff!" (or "Catherine!" depending on sexual preference).
Looking at the map, I guess the North York Moors and Whitby are probably too far away.
Does this friend have children? How long will they be there? One of my best friends lives there, but that mostly means I just know the best places to get cake.
The Royal Armouries are there, I do know that, and that's supposed to be a good place to visit. You want me to ask for more specific suggestions?
21: It sounds a damn sight better than any of the US attempts at similar. I would love to open up such a space, notwithstanding that I ran something similar and it was a huge headache. Revolting Beer!
Royal Armouries are a must if there are kids under 13 in the mix. Don't know how I forgot that. If it's just adults or older kids the municipal art collection at Temple Newsam is well worth a visit.
I lived in Leeds for the first fifteen years of my life. There used to be just one wine bar: The Conservatory. I think the smartest restaurants etc. are on The Calls, a street which used to be the main beat for local prostitutes, although I only got the one proposition myself. Culturally, the Henry Moore gallery is good. A bit out of town is the Yorkshire Sculpture Park - I think it's now called - which has a great collection of modern pieces set in a gentle stretch of northern landscape; should be good on a misty autumn day. Back in town there's the Frank Matcham designed Grand Theatre, which does opera, which all respectable members of the Leeds professional class attend. Lots of other bits of good Victorian architecture dotted around the town centre, including several shopping arcades. For brutalist architecture, don't miss the Leeds University campus, especially the lecture theatres building. The Armouries has a terrible building but the collection is amazing; it all came out of the Tower of London's collection. In fact, it is that collection, relocated into more space.
Grand Theatre apparently not actually by Matcham - just checked. But some of the nearby arcades are.
See also: City Varieties. The Corn Exchange used to be cool but is now mostly worthwhile for the architecture. Central Markets may get knocked down soon, go while it's still there and nongentrified.
According to our English houseguest, Hebden Bridge (just a wee bit west of Leeds) is home to a great music scene and lots of neat little shops, is full of lesbians, and has free city-wide wifi.
I have always assumed that, contrary to the standard usage of island, "kinifecrime island" refers solely to nattarGcMland, thus excluding wales and so forth.
34: Certainly at the Awl, where I first encountered it, it means the whole island.
Doesn't include the Channel Islands like Jersey or Sodor.
34,35: England is also quite stabby. The island is Britain, of course, though the Welsh likely just break of a consonant and sharpen it on a brick if they want a weapon.
19: The Henry Moore museum would be reason enough for me to go there. God, I love him. It looks like I'd have to go in summer though to see the sculpture garden.
If only I could fund a trip somehow. Hmm, the furthest north I've identified UK archivies that I might want to visit is Birmingham, but surely Leeds has important materials on Ghana too! For some reason!
34 - Scotland (sadly) isn't an island. Wales is still mostly friendly, but a few well-publicised knife-deaths in London and other places (Leeds being one too actually) is what earned the name.
Doesn't include the Channel Islands like Jersey or Sodor.
Sodor's (sort of) in the wrong channel to be a Channel Island.
Scotland is fairly stabby, by US standards, but as asilon says, not an island. Although once Maximum Eck gets his way, and we dig the great southern channel ...
Engineering panache, stimulus, economic revival. Rarr.
Sodor's (sort of) in the wrong channel to be a Channel Island.
Its not actually existing would probably debar it as well.
42. That, but surely it stands for Man. As in the diocese of Sodor and Man.
oh all of it is knifecrime island eh? well that makes more cartographical sense. unfogged traditions have an inclination for the perverse, though; ogged at one point suggested we didn't have enough incomprehensible in-jokes and that in future I should live in Ainran.
one does also hear than england is pretty stabby, so...
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The most awesome street art ever, bar none. Courtesy of PNH.
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Bits of England are pretty stabby, certainly. Other bits less so. In the rural bits, apart from those that have been colonised by the second home and third SUV brigade, people generally just sit around and slowly degenerate, until somebody goes completely nutso with a gun.
Leeds is much nicer now than when I was growing up there: the squalid back-to-back terraces have mostly been demolished or knocked through, the rat-infested sewer of the river Aire now runs (mostly) clean, and there hasn't been a proper race riot for a good few years.
I still think the best thing you can do as a tourist is leave the city and visit the nearby countryside--where, of course, it rains all the time too, but it's very pretty, when it's not hidden in cloud.
so more or less like south carolina, but with less huffing paint?
43: apparently it's derived from the Norse for "Southern Islands" - Man and the Inner and Outer Hebrides, as opposed to the Northern Islands which were the Orkneys, the Shetlands, Foula and Fair Isle. Wiki explains it all in great detail.
Don't know about the less huffing paint. I think glue is generally preferred, but I don't suppose people are that picky.
It was glue at my school.
Other touristy things things to do? Well, there's Opera North. If you like walking (and looking at decaying industrial architecture), follow the towpath along the Leeds-Liverpool canal from the lock by the Royal Armouries to the ruins of Kirkstall Abbey.
Tom Watson vs James Murdoch is better than Ali vs Frazier. Blood all over the carpet.
Or to Percy Thrower, Whalid Jumblatt or Humpty Dumpty either presumably
At my school it was glue, and butane. Between them they killed quite a few.
I may have mentioned before my first and only night bus experience in London, which involved sitting next to someone alternately smoking a cigarette and inhaling butane. I spent the entire trip expecting his sinuses to go off FOOOM like a fuel-air explosive.
people generally just sit around and slowly degenerate, until somebody goes completely nutso with a gun.
Did you hear about the Oxfordshire arsonist? Kept trying to burn down National Trust houses. Cameron's constituency.
Ainran sounds like a libertarian paradise.
58. For real? What is he, a deranged modernist architect?
55. Whoops.