This is my youngest son, Pascal, when he was two years old. He’s looking sheepish because he’s just picked an apple. It’s an apple from the orchard at Woolsthorpe Manor, Lincolnshire, the orchard where Isaac Newton first conceived of gravity.

We were drawn to this beautiful, remote farmhouse for a tea break on a long journey, and ended up learning some science. A master storyteller can make the laws of gravity come alive anywhere, even in a lift, but to experience them at Woolsthorpe adds an extra weight. The National Trust which now owns the house has turned a barn into a small discovery centre where you too can see the forces of nature anew, right where Newton did more than 300 years ago.

In his famous Proposition 75 Theorem 35, Newton wrote:

“If to the several points of a given sphere there tend equal centripetal forces decreasing in a duplicate ratio of the distances from the points; I say, that another similar sphere will be attracted by it with a force reciprocally proportional to the square of the distance of the centres.”

That “reciprocally proportional square of the distance” bit means the attraction gets stronger, much stronger, as things get closer together.

So it is with stories.

Sheffield and Leeds are 34 miles apart. When I told the story of Leeds steam engine pioneer Matthew Murray in the Cutlers’ Hall, Sheffield, the Interesting North audience gave me polite applause. (Granted, it was 10:30am on a Saturday when many had got up early to be there.) When I told the same story in Temple Works, Leeds, just across the road from the site of Murray’s Round Foundry the audience gave much more. I could have raised a mob there and then to tear down James Watt’s statue in City Square.

• A story in the same county is quite interesting.
• A story in the same city is more compelling.
• A story in the place where it happened is extra powerful.

It’s more than just playing to a home crowd. Actually being there increases exponentially the return on just a small leap of imagination. We can picture the protagonists standing beside us, under the same sun, breathing the same air. It’s why the microcontent of blue plaques is so powerful.

It’s why it was so much fun to talk last week about the Corn Exchange in the Corn Exchange. Several people have remarked on the same moment in the talk, something that brought this thing home to me.

Bettakultcha follows a lightning talk format of 20 slides in five minutes. When I reached the part about the amazing domed roof, there seemed little point showing people a Powerpoint slide of the inside of the Corn Exchange in the Corn Exchange. Cuthbert Brodrick’s masterpiece speaks for itself. So I blanked the screen and asked people to look up.

They looked up at the Spartan, modern-before-its-time structure above our heads. It turns out this was the point of maximum attraction, the moment people were as one with place, the point most remarked on in my conversations ever since.

Similar connections to place cropped up in some other Bettakultcha talks too:

• Lee Jackson cantilevers a whole history of hiphop from a Jimmy Savile story. (And, let’s face it, everyone in Leeds has a Jimmy Savile story.)
• Richard McCann‘s shocking and inspiring life story is wrapped up with the story of our city, dark side and all.
• Tim Ineaux follows in the four-legged footsteps of Muybridge’s horse and Le Prince’s traffic moving across Leeds Bridge.

All of which must not be taken to mean that local stories are static, parochial stories. As I argued at TEDxLeeds and hinted in my Corn Exchange talk, our city owes its dynamism to outsiders and their connections with other great cities around the world. Without Egypt, we would have no Temple Works; without France, no Louis Le Prince.

These unexpected links with other places, these wormholes, only open up when we open our imaginations to the things that happened in the past, in the places where we now find ourselves.

An oft-remarked characteristic of the internet is that it erases distance and difference, that it allows a script kiddy in Kazakhstan to cripple a business in California. In this account it seems local differences will be erased by the swelling ranks of the Republic of Facebook.

But this emerging medium must surely also power a resurgence in situated storytelling. The location-aware dimension of the mobile internet is uniquely well placed to bring stories to people where they need to know them most. The hyperlinked web dimension makes it possible to leap through wormholes from one situated story to its entangled quantum twin.

I wonder where they will take us next?

An Anecdote, related by Citizen Thelwall, at the Capel Court Society, during the discussion of a question, relative to the comparative Influence of the Love of Life, of Liberty, and of the Fair Sex, on the Actions of Mankind.

You must know then, that I used, together with a variety of youthful attachments, to be very fond of birds and poultry; and among other things of this kind, I had a very fine majestic kind of animal, a game cock : a haughty, sanguinary tyrant, nursed in blood and slaughter from his infancy — fond of foreign wars and domestic rebellions, into which he would sometimes drive his subjects, by his oppresive obstinacy, in hopes that he might increase his power and glory by their suppression. Now this haughty old tyrant would never let my farmyard be quiet; for, not content with devouring by far the greater part of the grain that was scattered for the morning and evening repast, and snatching at every little treasure that the toil of more industrious birds might happen to scratch out of the bowels of the earth, the restless despot must be always picking and cuffing at the poor doves and pullets, and little defenceless chickens, so that they could never eat the scanty remnant, which his inordinate taxation left them, in peace and quietness. Now, though there were some aristocratic prejudices hanging about me, from my education, so that I could not help looking with considerable reverence, upon the majestic decorations of the person of king Chaunticlere — such as his ermine spotted breast, the fine gold trappings about his neck and shoulders, the flowing role of plumage tucked up at his rump, and, above all, that fine ornamented thing upon his head there — (his crown, or coxcomb, I believe you call it — however the distinction is not very important) yet I had even, at that time, some lurking principles of aversion to barefaced despotism struggling at my heart, which would sometimes whisper to me, that the best thing one could do, either for cock and hens, or men and women, was to rid the world of tyrants, whose shrill martial clarions (the provocatives to fame and murder) disturbed the repose and destroyed the happiness of their respective communities. So I believe, if guillotines had been in fashion, I should have certainly guillotined him: being desirous to be merciful, even in the stroke of death, and knowing, that the instant the brain is separated from the heart, (which, with this instrument, is done in a moment,) pain and consciousness are at end — while the lingering torture of the rope may procrastinate the pang for half an hour. However, I managed the buisness very well; for I caught Mr. Tyrant by the head, and dragging him immediately to the block, with a heavy knife in my hand, separated his neck at a blow : and what will surprise you very much, when his fine trappings were stripped off, I found he was no better than a common tame scratch-dunghill pullet: no, nor half so good, for he was tough, and oily, and rank with the pollutions of his luxurious vices.

From Politics for the people; or, A salmagundy for swine, number 8, 1793, published by Daniel Isaac Eaton.

For telling this farmyard story, both Eaton and Thelwall (who had rooms on the Strand, near today’s Trafalgar Square) were tried for sedition.

I’m not sure if this is even the right place for a park. As Jane Jacobs wrote in The Death and Life of Great American Cities:

“Parks are volatile places. They tend to run to extremes of popularilty and unpopularity…
In orthodox city planning, neighbourhood open spaces are venerated in an amazingly uncritical fashion, much as savages venerate magical fetishes.”

But here’s a funny thing: for some reason, the land is already marked on some maps as “Chadwick Park,” as if someone hopes that by mapping a fiction they can make it reality.

Most days Chadwick Park looks like the bulldozed former chemical works that it really is. But not today, the snow day.

The white stuff erases the rubble and concrete to give us a glimpse into the future. Ever so fleetingly, the territory is the map.

“When you look at a city, it’s like reading the hopes, aspirations and pride of everyone who built it.”

And where better to illustrate this than in one of the world’s oldest industrial cities? The new cities springing up in Asia, Africa and South America have 200 years to wait before they have such depth of stories.

Looking down towards Leeds Bridge, we can imagine the scene where Louis Le Prince shot one of the world’s first ever movies. Together with his wife Lizzie, who trained in ceramics, Louis started a “school of technical arts” in Leeds. This marriage of arts and science is still alive today among the Leeds Savages and hackers at the Hackspace. While we think of new media as bits and bytes, digital content, the new media of the late Victorian period was chemistry – specifically the actions of light and chemicals on ceramics, brass, paper and celluloid. The Le Princes had to combine these things to come up with a whole new artform.

But to make his design a reality, Le Prince needed a way to reliably move the film through the gate of his camera or projector. He turned to an inventor who had something every city needs – tickets (just think of all those football matches and theatre performances). James Longley had invented a machine for dispensing tickets. Le Prince commissioned him to combine this know-how with his own work on photography to create his camera-projector.

And the result is this snippet of traffic moving across Leeds Bridge. If you don’t believe how important this is, you can look it up yourself in the Internet Movie Database where Le Prince dominates the movie charts for 1888. There are no entries for 1887.

Just down the road from Leeds Bridge is Meadow Lane where hacker Joseph Priestley moved in near Jakes and Nell’s brewery. He noticed bubbles on the vats of beer and wondered what they were. This led to a series of experiments which isolated the gas we know today as oxygen. Priestley shared his discoveries of the effect of this gas on plants and animals with his coffee-house friend Ben Franklin who, in a startling leap of imagination, suggested that we should stop chopping down trees. The green movement began wih a mint plant in a bell jar in Joseph Priestley’s kitchen. Steven Johnson also tells how Priestley invented a process for making fizzy drinks. He open sourced the method and Johann Shweppe cleaned up.

Speaking in Shanghai, the writer Charlie Leadbeater set out six C’s that determine a city’s capacity for innovation: combination, conversation, co-evolution, challenge, commitment and connection. I think we can see plenty of all six C’s here in Leeds. The Le Princes combined art and science, mchanics and chemistry to make moving pictures. Priestley’s exchanges with Ben Franklin and his French rival Antoine Lavoisier give us conversation.

For co-evolution – the ability of suppliers, manufacturers and customers to develop solutions together – we look across the city to the three Italianate towers of Tower Works. Thomas Harding who built the towers was a maker of pins, not dress-maker’s pins but the pins used by billion in the textile industry. He understood that the business would prosper if his customers could rely on standard sized pins from multiple suppliers, so he worked with his customers and competitors to develop a range of standard pin sizes, called the Harding Gauge. For a modern parallel, picture those pins as angle brackets and the Harding Gauge as HTML, a standard language facilitating endless innovation and efficiency improvements.

Co-evolution was also central to the parallel developments of coal-mining, manufacturing and consumption in our city. In Holbeck, Matthew Murray built the Round Foundry, possibly the world’s first integrated engineering works. But he faced challenge in the form of competition from Boulton and Watt, a much bigger name in the steam engine trade. James Watt Junior stole Murray’s ideas, recruited a spy at his factory and bought up land to stop Murray growing his business. But the competition spurred Murray on, and he built the steam engine for the first commercially-successful steam railway at Middleton Colliery.

It seems unjust that the engineer commemorated by a statue in City Square is not Matthew Murray but his nemesis James Watt.

Murray’s mentor John Marshall faced challenges of a different kind. He was a flax spinner and flax spinning was a flamable businss. When one of Marshall’s wooden-framed mills burned down he partnered with a designer of a different kind of mill, one made of cast iron and brick. That’s commitment! The resulting fire-proof mills, like Marshall’s Mill in Holbeck are an important step in the evolution of the skyscraper. So it’s fitting that Leeds is the home of the best new tall building of 2010.

We can list a series of start-ups and businesses grown in Leeds:

• Marks & Spencer, founded on Leeds Market
• Burtons, which mass-produced suits for de-mobbed soldiers after the Second World War
• Freeserve which revolutionised the business model for ISPs in Britain, enabling millions of households to get online for the first time.

But what’s left as we move from the indutrial to the post-industrial? At St Aidan’s former colliery near Garforth a five-storey-high giant walking robot stands marooned in a Teletubbyland of grassy hills and lakes.

What’s left, I think, is narrative capital, the wealth of stories we can draw on to make sense of our present and inspire our future, it’s the power people have to tell stories about their places and lives. And unlike coal, narrative capital never runs out. It’s a rich seam that’s getting deeper all the time.

Stories belong to everyone, so as well as the great innovators, the dead white men, it’s important to remember the contributions of ordinary people, like the thousands of women who laboured over spinning machinery in Temple Works, in its heyday the biggest room in the world.

And stories can be slippery when we try to grab hold of them. Of the heroes listed here:

• Louis Le Prince was a Frenchman who had to go to New York to commercialise his invention
• Joseph Priestley was from Leeds but ended his life in exile in the United States, having been hounded out of the country due to his radical political views
• Matthew Murray was a Geordie so the North East has as much claim on him as we do here in Leeds.

All of those people bear out Charlie Leadbeater’s sixth C, connection to the wider world. As do the buildings that our Nineteenth Century predecessors have left us. Squint and you can see:

• The Temple of Horus at Edfu on Marshall Street
• Rennaissance Florence, Verona and a Tuscan hill town on Water Lane
• A Venetian palazzo in Park Square
• Paris at Cuthbert Brodrick’s Corn Exchange

So when I hear that people want to make Leeds “the best city in UK” I wonder whether that’s ambitious enough. Our predecessors saw themselves not as better than, but certainly equal to, any great city anywhere in recorded history.

Which makes me optimistic for the future of the city. As the American writer and campaigner Jane Jacobs put it:

“Lively, diverse, intense cities contain the seeds of their own regeneration, with energy enough to carry over for problems and needs outside themselves.”

I think there’s a coherent narrative to be woven between all of the following, but for now, I offer them to you as a puzzle of jumbled bullet points. Fuller posts on some of them may follow.

1. It’s been a few weeks since my colleagues and I at Orange moved offices from Holbeck to Clarence Dock. I’ve been meaning to share some photos and thoughts on the new locality, ever since I saw Mike Chitty’s blog post and Imran Ali’s interesting response, Ideas for Cities. I know that was February and this in June. I will do so soon. Just call it slow blogging.

2. For Fathers’ Day, we took a family trip on the Leeds sightseeing boat from Granary Wharf to Clarence Dock. For 20 minutes the River Aire was our Canale Grande, only without the gondolas and palazzos. Lots of cities have a river, but I reckon we could do more with ours. If you live in Leeds you should take the boat at least once, just to see the familiar from a different perspective.

3. Kathryn, Tero and I hosted Leeds’ first ever Service Design Drinks at the Midnight Bell on Tuesday. It went even better than we’d hoped. We had a broad range of interests, some fascinating conversations and new connections made, including some people who travelled a long way to take part. We can see there’s more than enough interest for us to move to the next stage with Service Design Thinks, an evening of three talks followed by an open discussion. More on that soon.

4. Mike was one of our service design drinkers. He floated the concept of an Innovation Lab for Leeds: “a process – not a place.  It usually culminates in an intense workshop to allow key thinkers, influencers, technologists and service users to come together to work intensely and constructively on developing a vision for how things could be…” Turns out Imran had already been thinking about this too. Imagining a place to imagine solutions for our city: I guess that’s meta-imagineering.

5. Finally, back in Holbeck on Thursday night Temple Works was more alive than I’ve ever seen it before, with the Sh! Awards, a prize for the region’s most promising design students run by my friends at Brahm. Having been a judge as a series of amazingly confident young designers presented their work in the edgy surroundings of the Temple Works loading bay, I’m sure the best one won. You should check out Matthew Young‘s work now, before you see it everywhere. In particular, watch his D&AD nominated winning video, The City…

So join the dots! Can tell what it is yet? if you can, please let me know.

The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there. And so I’m loving the safari around the world’s largest city and capital of the British Empire, afforded by Chris Heathcote’s inventive Newspaper Club debut As It Is To-Day.

Chris has been feeding Newspaper Club’s editing software Arthr on a diet of old London press cuttings from the 18th Century to the 20th. The result is a delightful gallimaufry (my all time top new word of the week): here the city is described at the height of its pre-eminence in 1851, there is a reflection on the sad fate of Cleopatra’s Needle by the 1920s.

My own favourite dish gives a taste of the hazards of the 1790s “On Walking London Streets,” a 14-point list of instructions for avoiding pick-pockets, horse-drawn traffic and falling slops. I love the idea that the characters of my 1794 stories were moving through a million-person city for the first time. Was this their missing manual?

Also, an umbrella was considered “a machine”. So too, in the right hands, is a newspaper. You can buy it here.

Here in the heart of the world’s first industrial nation, it’s not unusual to see old places learn to serve new purposes in response to peoples’ changing needs. As traditional manufacturing has moved offshore, countless mills, factories and warehouses have been regenerated as offices, retail, flats and hotels. At Salt’s Mill, Bradford, you can find art and electronics under one roof.

Yet Temple Works stands out from the crowd for so many reasons. At first sight there’s the weighty Egyptian facade, modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu, looming incongruously over edge-of-town Holbeck. Inside, you can appreciate the sheer scale of the place; once it was reputedly the largest room in the world. And in its stripped-out state the innovative construction is easily visible. The sun streams in through 66 65 circular skylights.

Scratch the surface for something still more fascinating: in two distinct incarnations Temple Works tells the story of the past 160 years of working life, and with a third it poses tantilising questions about where we go next.

Temple Works 1.0 was a flax spinning mill, built by John Marshall, just as British manufacturing powered into the Victorian Age. Marshall’s first mills had been functional red-brick boxes constructed rapidly to house the innovative spinning frames that made his fortune. Joseph Bonomi’s stone facade signalled a new confidence, authority and permanence.

Despite his political opponents’ accusations of abuse of child-labour in his mills, Marshall was regarded as one of the most liberal factory owners of his time. In his factories, overseers were not allowed to use corporal punishment on the workers. Younger children were encouraged to attend day school, and older children were given free education on Monday afternoons.

Marshalls ceased production there in 1886, but the textile use continued, moving up the value chain from spinning to clothing manufacture for James Rhodes and Co. This was Britain as a maker of things, the Workshop of the World.

Temple Works 2.0 was the northern distribution depot of Kay’s, the mail-order catalogue. After the Second World War the historic manufacturing sectors were undercut by industrialisation elsewhere in the globe, where people could produce at lower costs and in greater variety. Now Brits wanted a piece of America’s consumer revolution, and Kay’s were ready to oblige. Think of 1950s catalogue shopping as the e-commerce of its day, and Kay’s as Amazon.com.

Just imagine Temple Works’ vast single-storey open space filled with clothing and consumer goods ready for dispatch to home-shoppers across Northern England. Kay’s is well within living memory, and in parts the mill is much as the warehouse people left it when they moved out five years ago. The regeneration plans entail the demolition of an unloved 1950s extension, but I really hope the new uses will connect as much with this era as with the distant rattle of Marshall’s spinning frames.

Temple Works 3.0? What does post-industrial, post-consumerist Britain look like? The days when we defined ourselves by our industrial production have long gone, though the making of things could yet stage a comeback. It would be great to see products stamped with “Temple Works” again. It’s unlikely to be mass production on John Marshall’s scale, so we’ll have to make up what’s lacking in quantity with quality in handmades and one-offs.

We have more stuff than ever before, but it’s no longer fashionable to define ourselves by what we buy. Leeds’ carefully cultivated image as the shopping capital of the North already looks anachronistic. As well as things, we will spin experiences, authentically anchored in time and place, but also shareable as multimedia, cast out upon the net and even as lights into the sky. For the first time in its life, Temple Works will be open to the public on a regular basis: people in, instead of goods out.

It’s encouraging that despite (because of?) the economic climate the people behind the scheme to turn Temple Works into a major cultural venue are connecting with all interested parties to make this a reality as soon as possible. The overall scheme will take many months, but some parts of the building could be usable within weeks. Coming soon – Temple Works 3.0 Alpha!

“I have got the Drawing for Your Arms in the Pediment done to a quarter of the size, shall order it to be such next week” – Robert Adam in letter to Sir Rowland Winn, owner of Nostell Priory, 1774

Now that’s what I call unfinished.

It struck a chord with me – first because of my own interest in how the way we get the news has changed, yet stayed the same, but also because this seems to be a particularly London phenomenon.

While the big screens do exist up North, they don’t yet feel quite as ubiquitous or oppressive as in the Capital.

Is this because we’re behind the times? Is an army of telescreen installers waiting for the next clear day to descend on some unsuspecting provincial town?

Or is it that Northerners just don’t feel the same need to be frenetically in the know, up to the minute, every moment of the day?

We can have slow food, how about slow news?

Along with millions of other Britons, we didn’t make it to the Dome in its inaugural year. We were too busy with our new arrival, our own Millennium baby. He just turned eight and for his birthday treat we took him and his friends to see the Tutankhamum exhibition at the Dome now renamed The O2.

Disclosure: I work for a competitor to O2, but my problem is not with their sponsorship. O2′s own branded interventions – a nightclub, ice rink and inflatable chill-out zones – have their own integrity and fit with the aesthetic of the Dome itself. The naming rights have been seen through with Orwellian ruthlessness: no mention of Millennia, or even of Domes, it’s The O2, plain and simple.

Yet our impression as we walked along the narrow shopping mall that skirts the perimeter of The O2 was a distinctly underwhelming “is this it?”

From the outside the space is huge, but the way the new arena, cinema, exhibition space and leisure facilities have been fitted in manages to totally obscure this once inside. Worse, the partitions that carve up the space are treated as clumsily cut out faux art deco stage setting with no acknowledgement of the structure itself.

Suburban shopping mall, airport terminal, Las Vegas casino, Dubai resort – this could be anywhere. Only it’s not just anywhere. It’s one of our landmarks, a tarnished one but a landmark all the same. Had the hype curve for the Dome dipped so low that we’d settle for this? Britain Deserves Better.