It’s a Saturday afternoon and I’m on the bus to Headingley when two men with bandanas covering half their faces get on board. Nobody bats an eyelid. The traffic is so dense that we’re inching along, so I hop off at the next stop and head there by foot instead. Opposite Greggs, in the heart of the area, a grumpy looking Mr Bean smokes a cigarette next to Batman, who’s sporting fishnet stockings. Further down the road, two women in Hawaiian shirts link arms and sing ‘Come On Eileen’ for no discernible reason other than they’re young, alive and it’s the weekend. I can make out a cluster of green-cloaked hobbits a little further down the road.
Is this a particularly vivid daydream? An elaborate creative writing exercise? Nope. Saturdays in Headingley are always like this, because Saturdays in Headingley are Otley Run day.
This is a local newspaper, so I’m assuming you’re familiar with the Run. But for the uninitiated or those new to the area: the Run is a crawl of between 15 and 20 pubs (the number is hotly contested) all different in style but united in their love of serving punters dressed up as Superman, a Kardashian and some minor Simpsons characters. The route starts at Woodies Craft Ale House in Far Headingley — a pleasant but unassuming place on a non-run day — and heads south for two and a half miles to boat-turned-pub The Dry Dock, just north of Leeds city centre.
According to local legend, the route was established by farmers in need of refreshment on their way to market, but was adopted by students and made a staple of student life in the city in the 1960s, becoming a compulsory module in every degree.
“My mum used to do it when she came to uni here in ’97, and it’s still a big thing”, says Amy Heeley, a University of Leeds Student and Social Secretary for Leeds Student Radio, one of the university’s largest societies and regular Otley Run goers. The difference now? The run has moved beyond students, she tells me. “It’s now something that people do for stag dos, bridal showers, birthday parties, whatever excuse they can find.”
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An explosion in popularity
Since 2020, the Run has exploded in popularity thanks to word of mouth and social media. Head to TikTok and you’ll be besieged by two types of Run posts – twenty-somethings doing carousels of their best costumes over multiple Runs (pray for their livers) and locals doing “only in Headingley!” posts about the zany goings on in the area. Which is fair, because the Run draws a big crowd: according to locals I speak to, a large number participate each Saturday – some say 500, others say 2,000. Many of these are not based in Leeds or students. Instead, punters travel from all over the UK (I meet people from Glasgow, Newcastle, London and Brighton) for the chance to, as one TikTok oompa loompa put it, get “Willy Wonka wasted”.
But it’s not all fun and games. The more the Run has grown, the greater the issues it has brought with it. Recent years have brought a frenzy of licensing disputes, security concerns, enraged residents, complaints about antisocial behaviour and, more concerningly, sexual harassment.
In 2020, a Public Space Protection Order was introduced to cover the route to deter people from urinating or defecating in public, verbal abuse, littering, and drug use with the threat of a £1,000 fine. It came after complaints from local residents and councillors, who have also led the charge against pubs being added to the Run, creating tensions with some local businesses who rely on the income it brings.
Tim Goodall, Green Party Councillor for Headingley and Hyde Park, tells me there’s a need to “restore balance” in the area, which has become overrun by Otley Runners on a Saturday. Local councillors are “not trying to close it down, we’re just trying to make it safer and calmer”, he says. He argues the shops and restaurants that “aren’t alcohol based are suffering”. Saturday should be the day they turn the highest profits, he says, but nobody wants to go out then because of the Otley Run.
'We had to try it, it's legendary'
One grey Saturday afternoon, I set off to Headingley to see the Run for myself. There’s not much in the way of chaos at Woodies, the Run’s starting point, beyond a short queue of punters in costumes waiting their turn to go inside. It’s a similar story further down the road at Headingley Taps, the grand former water pumping station-turned-watering hole where many start a shortened version of the Run. There’s a much longer queue here, but it’s calm and orderly. It’s there that I meet “Bowser” (a pseudonym reflective of the character he’s come costumed as), a chirpy man with a broad grin who has travelled from Newcastle to Leeds to celebrate his 26th birthday. He’s there with his friends, who are dressed as the rest of the Super Mario Brothers cast.
“It’s a big event, everyone talks about it and we’ve never done it before, so we had to try it, it’s legendary”, he says. He tells me they’re excited to have the “full Otley” experience — and despite some joshing among the group and jokes about getting old, they seem good natured and in no mood to make trouble.
Whatever its problems, it seems clear the Run has become an indispensable part of the local ecosystem. I chat to straight talking Headingley Fancy Dress owner Shirley Phillipson, whose outfit – a fleece and jeans – is considerably more muted than you’d expect of someone in her line of work. She tells me the Run brings a “nice uplift” to her sales but offers more than an economic boost: it’s become part of the community’s identity. She argues the Otley Run isn’t just good for her shop and the pubs, but is good for Headingley as a whole. “When there isn’t many Otley Runs on in January, Headingley is miserable.”
She has been selling fancy dress in Headingley for more than a quarter of a century, so Shirley knows better than anyone how the Run has changed over time. “Nobody dressed up on the Otley Run 25 years ago – she’s responsible”, says her nephew and shop assistant Johnny, with a chuckle.
Yes, antisocial behaviour does happen, Shirley concedes, but businesses on the Run do their best to mitigate the impacts. Whenever she sells costumes to Otley Runners, she always takes the packaging away to prevent littering, and has just spent her morning clearing up discarded costumes which weren’t bought from her, but were blocking the road.
Is the Run eating its own community?
But change is divisive. The Otley Run has grown – estimates of how much vary wildly depending on who you ask, but everyone agrees numbers have gone up and more people are coming from out of Leeds to participate. As it has done so, Tim Goodall says it’s fundamentally changed the local culture and begun to eat its own community. “Residents were saying we can’t take this anymore, something has to happen or we’ll move away. Some residents have now moved away because they’ve just got so sick of it”, he tells me. But if the community can’t live with it, but can’t live without it, what do you do? Nobody has a simple answer.
For Shirley, a quick win would be to open The Golden Beam to Otley Runners. The Beam, a large Wetherspoons around halfway between Far Headingley and the city centre, is a big source of tension. The pub opened in 2021 under the licensing agreement that it couldn’t let in Otley Runners. This was applied to address public concern – namely, potential anti-social behaviour and that adding another pub to the Run could increase the ‘danger’ to young drinkers, as reported by the Yorkshire Evening Post at the time. The Golden Beam has toyed with the idea of changing its licence over the past few years and was allowed to serve Otley Runners on five consecutive Saturdays in 2025 using a Temporary Event Notice. But an application to have the condition permanently removed was rejected in December last year.
“It’s a bit silly when they’ve got 32 toilets in there,” says Shirley, who believes urinating in the streets is the biggest problem the Run causes. “It doesn’t make sense – even if you opened another four, five, or six pubs on the Otley Run, it’s not going to increase the numbers. The Beam is so big, so let the Otley Runners in. It takes them off the streets.”
But if this happened, counters Goodall, the pub would be breaking its promise to residents. Plus, the last thing revellers need is another place to have a drink. He describes several residents having had to save people who have collapsed. “There could have been very serious consequences if a passer-by hadn’t stopped and helped them”, he tells me.
I asked to speak to nine Otley Run pubs and Leeds City Council for this piece and didn’t hear back, but Councillor Goodall was keen to stress that dialogue between pubs and the council is open and cooperative. Between the pubs and the council, huge effort is put into tackling antisocial behaviour. But what happens when behaviour goes from antisocial to violent?
A dark day on The Otley Run
Last year, Owen Lawrence, a Headingley local, shot two women with a crossbow on the Otley Run and then took his own life. Prior to the attack, he had posted on Facebook, describing his targets (“Students, Night Club Goers, Pub Crawler’s [sic], Otley Run Participants, Society, Humanity, Human Race, Neurotypicals and Police”) and categorising the attack as “Spree Killing, Mass Murder, Terrorism, Revenge, Misogynyic [sic] Rage, Homicide/Suicide”. He’d previously expressed misogynistic views on Facebook, listing his dislikes in a post months earlier as “gender equality”, “feminists of all four waves”, “female empowerment” and “feminoids”.
While what happened was terrible and shocking, arguably somebody like Lawrence could have attacked women anywhere. It was pure chance that it happened at Headingley. But it does raise concerns about how viably West Yorkshire Police can patrol such a unique situation: a recurring, mass participation event which takes place outside of a secure, enclosed space like a stadium. When asked about how they police the Run, West Yorkshire Police declined to comment, but have previously said their presence on the Otley Run has increased since the crossbow attack.
Back on the Run itself, it doesn’t feel like the average person has safety on their minds. I’m outside Dry Dock, the Run’s finish line, at 9pm. It’s still relatively quiet, most of the Runners still to come, but a steady stream walk – or stagger, depending on how well they hold their pints – over the finish line, including a trio of bedraggled green cloaked hobbits looking like they’d have been better off staying in the Shire.
The average age of Runners skews far younger than at the beginning. Four lads in football shirts spot the pub and let out the sort of unbridled roar of victory usually reserved for winning Olympic gold.
“We’ve done it, we’ve fucking done it!” one cheers.
Others take out their phones to capture the moment they crossed the finish line, and, just as I’m about to head home, Birthday Bowser and the rest of the Mario crew appear. They’re all present and correct with all their fancy dress still intact – a 10/10 for a group’s first Otley Run.
Bowser says he’s had a nice day, but he’s markedly less keen to chat at the finish line than he was several hours ago. To be fair, who amongst us isn’t a little less verbal after 15 or more pints? I wish him a good rest of his night and wander home, thinking of Batman and Mr Bean and the hobbits — and myself, not in fancy dress. On a Saturday on Otley Road, what could be more abnormal than that?
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