Red brick terraces behind a high street, and the allotments where The Beiderbecke Affair built Big Al's office.
What Headingley looks like
is the high street, with shops and pubs at pavement level. The side streets behind it, among them and , run in red brick terraces built up mostly between 1801 and 1911. Stone sills and door surrounds repeat down each block, and more than a hundred of the terraces and villas across the area are listed buildings.
Streets around hold larger stone villas and former schools, set back behind hedges and low walls. Off Spring Bank, stone cottages sit at the corners under Dutch gables. Corner shopfronts along Otley Road include a stone building with an estate agency at street level, its upper storeys unchanged above the modern signage.
sits within the same square mile, one site holding a cricket ground and a rugby stadium. The cricket side seats 18,350 and the rugby side 19,700. Floodlights and stands run around both pitches, with new pavilions built on each side between 2017 and 2019.
allotments run behind a gated entrance on the road, sheds and rows of plots screened by hedges behind it. The plots back onto ordinary terraced streets on either side, with parked cars along the kerb.
Shot in Headingley
For The Beiderbecke Affair, the 1985 Yorkshire Television series, Big Al's allotment and office were shot at Ash Road Allotments. The site's rows of plots and sheds stand behind a gated entrance off Ash Road.
The Beiderbecke Affair, 1985
Ash Road Allotments
A shed inside the gates served as Big Al's office, the allotments' own site says. Rows of plots and further sheds run back from the entrance, screened by hedges on both sides. Street View
What Headingley can double for
Great Horton in Bradford, England
Great Horton carries back to back terraces built under Bradford's post 1866 bylaw, laid out on the same open ended street pattern and dating from the same decades as Headingley's own rows. Gathorne Street and the streets around it keep the same close, uniform frontage a scout would want from Headingley. Great Horton's terraces are built in stone rather than the brick and stone sills Headingley uses, so a close shot of the walling gives the location away. Try searching back to back stone terraces now.
Rusholme's terraced houses off Wilmslow Road went up in the same late Victorian and Edwardian decades as Headingley's, in the same red brick with similar stone detailing. Both sit behind a busy high street of independent shops rather than a chain. Wilmslow Road's own restaurant signage gives the location away in wide shots, so a side street away from the road holds the match better. Try searching red brick terraced side street now.
