Cookridge Once Fields And Farms

A Memory of Cookridge.

I moved from Holbeck in 1948 into one of the first estates to be built in North West Leeds, Ireland Wood (Raynels). In 1950 I went to Cookridge School, then a wooden hut right slap bang opposite where Cookridge fire station is now. The old locked school gates leading nowhere are still there.. behind them is the grassy bank of the reservoir for the water tower which, in those days was only half the size it is now, around 1965 it expanded onto what was our old school playground. In those days travelling out of Leeds there were no buildings WHATSOVER right from the row of house houses next to Holy name church past Raynel Way (St Paul's Church was not even built then) right to Pickles Farm at Bramhope except for Cookridge Hall Lodge, next to Holt Lane, that lodge is still there. (The Hall was then an Epileptic Home, it's now a golf course and sports complex.) EVERYTHING to the right side was then just fields, Holt Park was all farm fields, and just two farm familes, the Perkins brothers lived in the whole of Holt Park. Where the Eryie pub now stands was Horse Shoe Wood, presumably planted years ago by the Cookridge Hall Family, it stretched from the junction of Holt Lane in a 30-yard-wide strip up along Otley Old Road almost to the water tower, swung 100 yards to the left then back down to Holt Lane again, a perfect 30 yards wide 'horseshoe' with a large field in the middle. The wood was always full of rooks, sometimes we used to get paid to cull them with airguns, 3d a bird.
The only two actual buildings on what is now Holt Park were two farms, High Farm, off Farrar Lane, run by Richard Perkins, (now a pub) and Low Farm, on Holt Lane (now a big house at the end of the golf course), run by his brother, Stanley Perkins. I worked for them both as a kid. Both were tenant farmers of the old Cookridge Hall estate. Stan's huge longhorn Highland Cattle grazed on what is now the golf course, right down to Paul's Pond Wood. I handled dairy Friesians quite well but the Highland Cattle frightened me to death, they chased you. I climbed many a tree to avoid those horns, much to the amusement of the two Perkins brothers.
In 1950 the nearest shops to the Raynels were Holmfield Cafe, down on new Adel lane, (it had static caravan dwellers on a field which is now part of Lawnswood cemetery,) or else a walk up to Cookridge Post office, just past Holt Lane. The shops on Raynel Way were not there, they were built a little later, as was the Ireland Wood School there, we were moved to it down from the wooden hut next to the water tower around 1951.  
The shops first opened about the same time, in what are now the old garages, (behind the existing shops.) There were three opened up there, the grocer was 'Merrymans' and the sweet shop Mrs Wholehouse. I remember sweet rationing coming off and being able to actualy buy six pennorth of sweets... luxury. The other shop was a butchers, Mr Bennet. He was the famous Alan Bennet's father. It's mentioned in his memoirs.
Green Lane at Cookridge veered off Otley Old Road down to Pounds Farm, it dead-ended at  Mosely Wood, which was huge in those days, covering all of what is now the huge Cookridge Mosely wood estates, then a huge forest. The 'Fox and Hounds' end of Green Lane did not exist. It petered out not far from Cookridge Post Office on Otley Old Road. That is where the first bus (33  Cookrige) turned around by reversing into Green Lane. Later they introduced a 2nd service (36 Tinshill) which turned down Tinshill Lane but in those days there was nothing down Tinshilll Lane to go to.
From the Fox and Hounds onward there was next to nothing beween Tinshill Road and the railway track except woods, then across the lines right up again to Scotland Lane except fields. Strange to think that if you lived on Scotland Lane, Horsforth in those days your nearest neighbour over the back garden fence lived miles away, down across the railway and right up into Tinshill Road Cookridge. Nothing in between, now there must be thousands of homes there in Cookridge, then there were at the most a few hundred. The Raynels and early Iveson estate practically trebled the wartime population of the area. Now it is perhaps a thousand times more again, all in that same three square miles of fields.
If you walked on the right hand side of the road from opposite the Wise Owl pub (not built then) to Bramhope you would only pass two buildings, Cookridge Hall Lodge at the end of Holt Lane and Pickles farm below Bramhope Cemetary. No radio mast opposite the water tower, nothing whatsover just fields and woods.
How it has all changed in 60 years. In those days if you walked up to school from Raynel Way you knew the name of every single person you met on the way. The estate after Hopital Lane was then the playing fields for Leeds Grammar School, nothing at Tinshill, very little at Cookridge, perhaps a dozen or so private houses at the bottom. Now? perhaps a thousand? Holt Park School alone has 1,500 pupils and there is a huge supermarket, a shopping complex, swimming baths and a library in the old North Dairy pasture. A pub called the Eyrie stands where we once shot the rooks in Horseshoe Wood and on top of that Richards Farm is now the High Farm pub and his pig barn and cow sheds are now their restaurant. The only thing left is the orchard (still growing the pears for Mrs Perkins' pear wine.)
I wonder what Stanley and Richard Perkins would have made of all this?