Leeds: First Impressions

Leeds.
Well, I'm here... I've been very warmly received at the University of Leeds by my host Stephen Coleman and the staff of the Institute of Communications Studies, and I've now taken up residency as a visiting scholar. I think I'm going to get some work done here - and I've already launched myself into tackling a couple of papers which need to be finished soon.

My first impressions of Leeds are a little more mixed so far. The city centre itself is quite nice, with a number of very neatly redeveloped Victorian (I guess) shopping arcades - very pretty, and reminding me to some extent of the inner city of my hometown of Hannover in Germany. Part of this could also be due to the freezing weather we're having at the moment - nights at -5° and days not far above freezing bring back memories of the long dark winters of my childhood, however crisply sunny the days may be. I'm told we're even expecting some snow over the next few days...

Further out from the city, though, the suburbs turn to what I imagine is typical for many of the traditional English industrial centres - somewhat foreboding, grimy and dark workers' houses stacked against one another in tight rows. From a distance, they look like miniature replicas of real houses; from closer up, they're still tiny, gritty, and packed in incredibly closely - especially when compared with the far more generous housing spaces available in Australian cities. And I'm staying in one of them, in the tenement room of a student sharehouse. Sleeping in one of them might be the more appropriate description, though - I don't expect to spend an awful amount of time at the house otherwise. And perhaps that's not such a bad thing - much as in my first few months in Australia, back in 1994 when I stayed for a while at an all-boys residential college at the University of Queensland, the absence of social contacts or a particularly pleasant home is likely to direct my focus to my work, and to my work alone.

That's not to say that I'll be a complete hermit while I'm here - I'm certainly looking forward to meeting more of my temporary colleagues at the ICS, and fellow former UQer Guy Redden is now based not far from here at Lincoln University. I expect I'll also be escaping for a quick visit to my mum on Ibiza for a weekend (if I can find an affordable flight during the off-season for UK charter flights), and I'm seriously considering renting a car to drive up to the ICE 3 conference at Loch Lomond near Glasgow. Let's see how the weather develops, though.

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