Emma Bentley Fox

Woodhouse Moor - ‘Space to Bloom’

With thanks to The Cultural Institute, University of Leeds and partners Leeds City Council and West Yorkshire Combined Authority

In 2024 Emma Bentley Fox, with Street Space, led 3 months of engagement & consultation with community members in and around Woodhouse Moor Park. Tasked with exploring perceptions of safety in the park, and co-designing creative interventions to make it feel safer and more welcoming. This project, led by the University of Leeds’ Cultural Institute, built on a recent study from the School of Law and West Yorkshire Combined Authority which found that feeling vulnerable in parks is a barrier that needs to be urgently addressed to ensure that women and girls feel able to use, enjoy and benefit from them.

Through pop-up events, attending local groups and sessions, running workshops and recruiting a Collaborative Design Team of local residents, Emma & Street Space produced an engagement report and series of recommendations for commissioning artworks. The latest update of that engagement work is available to read online here.

Hidden Histories Viewfinder Tour & Heritage Resource

As a result of the engagement work, Emma was commissioned to create a heritage resource. Building on some of the rich knowledge that local residents passed on through community consultation, the resource was made possible with the generous supported of Leodis, the Leeds Libraries and Museums & Galleries archives. This heritage resource is available free to the public, via printed copies, audio file online for a self-guided tour, and a digital pdf. Tours were bookable as a series of guided walking tours. Each walk was combined with a viewfinder with historical images, that take you back in time to places and parts of the park either long gone, or perhaps where traces still remain.

See the walking tour pdf below, a plain-text and audio version are available on request, available via the Cultural Institute’s website.