Nowadays, when we hear the term 'squatters' we immediately think of homeless people who have illegally taken over an empty property and are living in it. Not a lot of it about in Barlick you might think but it wasn't always so. Long ago there were two distinct areas in the town, those parts owned by the Lord of the Manor (for many years it was Kirkstall Abbey) and 'The Waste' which was common land controlled by the Manorial Court. If you wanted to build you had to persuade the Lord to let you use some of his land, he owned the land and whatever you built he charged you rent each year (Still with us today in leasehold properties.) If this wasn't possible or you couldn't afford rent there were two other alternatives.
The first was to find a piece of land in the town that had been overlooked, possibly because it was too small for building, to which nobody laid claim. You threw up a rough shelter and started living in it waiting to see if anyone raised any objections. The strangely shaped hovel in Walmsgate which was refurbished a few years ago by the Town Council is such a building. It is triangular because that is the shape of the overlooked plot where the old main route through Barlick used to strike off towards Back Lane (Now Philip Street) after crossing what was then the ford over Gillian's Beck (Culverted in 1816). I don't know if any rent was ever paid but I have the evidence of Ernie Roberts in the LTP that until the 1930s an old widow lived there in the single room with a small fireplace. Ernie used to read her son's letters for her and write replies. When she died the building was deserted and deteriorated until the 1980s when, faced with either demolishing it and building an expensive retaining wall or refurbishing it at less cost, the latter course was taken and purely by accident the town has this wonderful survivor.
The second option was to encroach onto the waste. You picked a spot where the waste or common land met the town, jumped over the fence and built a shelter. This would be noted of course and at the next meeting of the Manorial Court who controlled the waste, you'd be hauled up and fined for doing it. However, it wasn't in the Court's interest to evict you and demolish your shelter because if they did they were responsible for providing for you because you were destitute and homeless. It made sense to simply impose a fine (rent) every year.
We have an example, Tubber Hall, which is now a ruin just off Lister Well Lane where it leaves High Lane. In 2000 Shirley Oldfield told me that until 1947 she lived there with her father Thomas Alderson and they kept pigs. She said that her father told her it was originally an encroachment onto the waste. We are very lucky to have these two examples of how people coped long ago.
The remains of what used to be Tubber Hall just off Lister Well Lane.
