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By James Hill, Senior Arts Project Officer, Leeds City Council and Duncan Scobie, Marketing Executive, Marketing Leeds.

Photograph - Phill Davison, the Leeds Historical Exploration Society

Viral marketing

Since the Secret Leeds site went live in February 2007, it has garnered 1,179 registered users, 23,650 individual posts, 83,919 absolute unique visitors, 208,034 visits, 1,631,065 page views (all figures according to Google analytics). The population of Leeds Metropolitan District is 720,000.

Initially, the website was marketed as part of the Celebrate Leeds package of events. Although there was no printed material to support or advertise the website, interest from local media, both print and broadcast, has been strong, and a three-minute slot on BBC television programme 'Look North' about the underground river below Leeds City Station led to a spike of 1,275 visits in one evening.

Secret Leeds' presence on the internet has spread beyond the bounds of the website itself to Facebook groups and MySpace blogs. The Leeds Historical Exploration Society get together for Sunday trips to sites of interest, take excellent photographs of them and post them up as blogs on MySpace, combining their beautiful photography with the findings of their research on the site that they have visited. There are no discussion groups on the Secret Leeds Facebook group and I find that there is little more that users can do with it other than post up photographs. However, there are currently 1,313 members (almost the same number as there are registered users on the website itself). The membership is growing steadily and it clearly serves to drive a small but steady number of new members towards the website itself. Similarly, the various Flickr groups that have been set up allow people to display their photographs of Leeds' secrets in full resolution.

My job title is Senior Arts Projects Officer for the Arts & Regeneration Unit of Leeds City Council. As far as I am concerned, website development is an art form (one at which I am a relative novice) and contribution to a website such as this constitutes genuine creative activity on the part of its users (telling their stories, sharing their memories, celebrating their own photographic skills, local environs, lives...).

Solving civic mysteries

Secret Leeds has become what I believe to be an excellent example of how participatory, socially engaged practice via the internet can play a strong role in regeneration and community cohesion.

I would like to focus on the example of a single thread to illustrate this: ‘A Very Old Establishment Down Skull's Head Yard' attempting to summarise in a few words a thread that has 1,775 posts. An old folk song about Leeds tells the story of two stone skulls in the wall of the Crown & Fleece pub in the city centre, which commemorated the death of two soldiers in that building. Readers of Secret Leeds decided to track these skulls down. They found the site of the old Crown & Fleece pub, but no skulls. They then gathered together at the Central Library and read articles from old Leeds newspapers that proved the skulls had been there in the 1960s, but had been moved, when that area of the city centre began to fall into disrepair. The site is in one of the oldest, but also must un-regenerated, areas of the city centre.

They tracked the skulls down to the corrugated iron wall of a warehouse on the periphery of the city centre. They had been moved there in 1974 by a concerned citizen who simply felt that they would be destroyed when the area was demolished. The warehouse that now holds them is itself derelict.

However, the readers of Secret Leeds have tracked down the family of the owners of the warehouse, have gained permission from them to take possession of the stone skulls and are now in talks with Leeds Civic Trust to have the skulls returned to their original site and marked with a blue plaque which will record the history of the skulls and will remember the two soldiers who died at the site.

Community engagement

Leeds City Centre has undergone an extraordinary level of regeneration over the past fifteen years, with a thriving retail and entertainment sector, and a rapidly increasing city centre residential population. However, this has been largely driven by the presence of the financial and legal sectors investing in the city. While the city centre looks a lot better than it did in 1990, the ubiquitous high-end drinking establishments, restaurants, night-clubs and branches of Harvey Nichols and other expensive retail chains have left many people feeling alienated from a city centre which they cannot afford to live in or use.

The area to which the skulls will be returned will soon be regenerated by developers in the same way as much of Leeds City Centre has been over the past 15 years. The story of the Two Skulls is an example of how an internet site has allowed the people of the City to truly play a part in a redevelopment process, which they might otherwise have been in danger of feeling very alienated from. The readers of Secret Leeds have taken action, met, researched, gathered information, lobbied to retain an ancient piece of the history of Leeds which they feel to be important. They have taken ownership of a small part of the redevelopment of the city centre, and Secret Leeds was the catalyst which has allowed them to do this.

Online community leads to meeting IRL

The readers of Secret Leeds get together for pub lunches. They share spreadsheets they have created which detail the timeline of every owner, every resident, of old buildings in the city. They put on their walking boots and go out walking together on Sunday. Sometimes, they establish their sense of ownership of the city by visiting places that they should not visit, sharing their photographs afterwards. They campaign and lobby for things that they feel to be important in the city, which might otherwise be forgotten in the relentless march of regeneration.

Comments such as ‘I thought I was the only person interested in this stuff' are typical of the reaction of new visitors to the site. Not only has the website allowed people to find others who share what they might previously have thought to be a very narrow interest (across the world as well as across the city), but it has also been the catalyst for the kind of ‘meaningful interaction' and ‘engagement with heritage' that are seen as being central drivers in the promotion of community cohesion.

James Hill is Senior Arts Project Officer at Leeds City Council and Duncan Scobie is Marketing Executive for Marketing Leeds.

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