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"Thank you for visiting Foxwood High School"
the teacher said so many years ago as I looked round the school
with my parents. How those memories of the school keep coming back. It was
some years since I left in 1982 but what had become of
my friends, teachers and my old school?
When I heard Foxwood was to be
demolished, I decided to document it, warts and all before it,
and all its memories are lost forever, which ever way you look
at it Foxwood was part of nearly everyone's lives who lived or
grew up in the East Leeds area in the late 1950's to the mid 1990's.
The building may have changed its name over the past 50 odd
years from Foxwood High School, East Leeds High in 1992
to East Leeds Family Learning Centre in 1996. To me and so many others
it will always be Foxwood.
I had the opportunity in September 2009 to return
to Foxwood and look round every floor and nearly every room
taking photos as I
went. Unfortunately the old workshops and the 2 gyms had been
demolished in February 2009 and were long gone.
The idea of the website is to try and capture as
much information as possible, so feel free to contact me if you
have any photos, stories or just anything you would like to
share with others.
I will leave you with an extract from the last
paragraph of the late Bob Spooner's book "Lay Stone on Stone" about his
time as Headmaster at Foxwood, written in 1988.
.........It would have been satisfying if the
first comprehensive school in Leeds had stayed to be part of the
national heritage and not just a meteor that shot across the sky
and burnt itself out. But it was not to be and in the cold light
of dawn the bulldozers are preparing to reduce what we have
built to rubble........
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