Streets with all the ambience of a landfill

The rats are having a field day. The scavengers have been pigging out on the rich pickings of a refuse collectors' strike in the suburbs of Leeds.

For two months the rodents have been fattening themselves up for the coming winter. With wheelie bins overflowing, particularly in student districts such as Headingley and Hyde Park, the rats are the only ones who are anything like content.

The unrelenting nature of the protest - the length of the stand-off has inevitably drawn parallels with militant walkouts in the 1980s - has left Headingley shrouded in the whiff of landfill.

The root cause of the dispute also seems to be a throwback to another generation: the Liberal Democrat and Conservative-run council is trying to equalise pay between male and female workers. Instead of raising the pay of female staffers, it wants to cut the salaries of male workers. The first proposal was a £4000 ($9165) drop for some. What's more, the council thinks the workers need to up their work rate. The strike could soon be mirrored elsewhere in the country: bin collectors in Brighton are also due to walk out this week.

Few of the students in Headingley were alive in 1979. The term "all-out strike" is just the stuff of political history textbooks. They sit at the centre of what future books may call a new wave of industrial action. They're not enjoying it.

Jess Johnson, a 20-year-old music student, has "flipped", to use her own phrase. Looking out of her bedroom window on to the back alley of Headingley Mount, she is so angry at the sight of giant slabs of mouldy food that she is bagging it up herself.

"It's disgusting; it's like we've been forgotten by the council. People think students don't care where they live but nobody should live like this."

She knows her efforts may be for naught: bin bags that don't fit in the bins risk being ripped apart by foxes or, as the most recent street craze has it, blown up with fireworks. And so she struggles outside the redbrick terraces, where university students cram in six to a house, to hold back a waste tide of pizza. And beer cans. And vodka bottles. She can just about cope with the used sanitary towels and soiled tissue. She recoils in horror at wriggling maggots.

Other areas of the city have fared better, cleansed by small cadres of refuse workers who were finally talked back into work at the end of last week and new recruits hired by the council to break the strike.

Some areas are heading towards sanity but the patched-up patrol has clearly not reached all corners. The streets are still revolting.

- INDEPENDENT