Jonathan's Story | Humans of Harehills

"I came here because it was cheap to live, and I found a genuinely vibrant community. I’ve lived all over East Leeds and I can honestly say I would only ever know one immediate neighbour. You wouldn’t know anyone else on the street. You wouldn’t know people from around the corner. In Harehills it’s different. You get all these different community events that go on. I get invited to all sorts of things, some of the stuff I wouldn’t have even heard of. I had quite the shock when I first moved here and realised that the West Indian carnival was going on at the bottom of my street. It's a surprising place!

I started my blog, Harehills Love, in the wake of the Bonfire Night troubles that happened in 2019. There was such a negative picture of Harehills after that even though many of the people involved weren’t even from Harehills. From that point I started getting more involved in community stuff. I hadn’t started the blog at the time. It was only in summer 2020, we were well into the pandemic, and I kept coming across negative stuff online about Harehills and I decided I want to do something about that. I want to highlight the great things like CATCH and Breaking Down Barriers and all the wonderful things we’ve got going on.

Towards the end of 2020 there was a Leeds Live journalist who decided to stroll up and down Harehills Lane on Bonfire Night hoping that the troubles would start again and they didn’t, so he was just picking apart bits of Harehills and stuff like that, he was “in fear of his life.” As a result of that I decided to start doing the Advent Calendar, sharing news each day in December to celebrate the area, its heroes and its history. There was a journalist right there and they were only looking for the worst possible story they could find, and they were struggling. I just thought, I can easily find 24 good news stories about Harehills."

Jonathan’s blog can be found here: https://harehillslove.uk/

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