Now! Then! 2024! - Yorkshire On This Day

Excerpt

The crowded conditions in what Queen Victoria called “this great city” naturally make its poorer inhabitants aware of one another’s lives. You have to know your neighbour opposite on the first floor when you want to string a clothes line across the street to dry your own washing. Each house has its doorsteps yellowed on the edges: thousands of people are content to wait in queues. Leeds is indeed an ants’ nest. And when the King and Queen came in August, 1933, to open the new Civic Hall (quite forty houses must have been demolished to clear the site), some of the saddest, dingiest little lanes had their decorations and hardly an exhausted Wolf Cub or irritated infant was without its red, white and blue favour or Union Jack. I was wandering about in the little lanes of the Richmond Hill Ward (average 2.17 persons per room) as the guns went off which announced the Royal entrance to the city. The courts and alleys where I stood were deserted. Everyone had gone to see the King and Queen. Suddenly bells pealed out under the clouds and even louder than the bells came the cheering. When I approached as near to the centre as I could through the crowds, the sun came out and down the steps of the Town Hall came the Queen in white. The cheers were deafening, hats and flags were waved. The city was alight with excitement. And then when the rain fell in the evening, after the Royal visitors had driven away, back went the crowds to their back-to- backs, “Long Live the King, God Bless our King and Queen.” “It is my earnest hope and prayer that today’s ceremony may prove the beginning of increased prosperity for this great city.” That should be proof enough of Leeds loyalty. And like a loyal parish Leeds did not expose its blemishes that day. It smiled through its illness. I think a city which has such remarkable people should take better care of them.

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Original

LEEDS – A CITY OF CONTRASTS
Bernard Shaw said something about Leeds – that it ought to be burned down, or words to that effect; expressed of course with more epigrammatic force and probably rather more kindly. And this is not surprising. Leeds is not a city for Mr. Shaw; it caters for communists and conservatives. An individualist would not understand it. So individualists have no right to criticise it. It is as though an art critic walking through a spinney were to object to the contours of a mound made by wood ants. The person to examine the heap should be the entomologist: the person who ought to examine Leeds should be the town planner. An æsthetic appreciation of Leeds is of little value, because Leeds has little use for æsthetics. For this reason the Civic Hall at Leeds must be regarded only as a symbol of the Civic Pride of the Conservative party in that city.

By likening Leeds to an ants’ nest, I do not mean to decry the city or its inhabitants, but rather to show that Bernard Shaw went no deeper than an art critic.

To understand Leeds, to understand its Civic Hall and the regrettable Headrow, one must acquire a Leeds sense of proportion. And this is done by realising two things about Leeds. First, it is a Victorian city. Secondly, it is parochial. These two qualities are far more blessed than is generally supposed. Today, when cosmopolitanism is still the rage, parochialism, and all that goes with it, is unpopular. Leeds does not attract tourists. There is not even a guide-book to the city. Life in Leeds must be unbearable for the Londoner.

Leeds is a Victorian city. Once the train passes Grantham the character of England changes; you enter a foreign country. Disused branch lines, now only sidings, are full of empty trucks labelled L.N.W.R., G. & S.W., N.B., G.N.R., M.R., memorials of happy days before the railways amalgamated. Even the large, gas-lit stations with their smoking-rooms, buffets, first-class, second-class and general waiting rooms, whose green sunless walls once sheltered varying degrees of commercial prosperity, are still plastered with notices belonging to the old railway companies. And when, here and there, some modernistic poster has been introduced on to black platform or into high secluded refreshment room, it is as though a woman with make-up had entered with harsh giggles and puffed cigarette smoke into that ordered Victorian life.

And outside the stations, from the high embankments the country spreads out like a map. Large mills, with square panes broken, stand up among strips of houses stretched around them, “TO LET,” “THIS CONVENIENT FACTORY FOR SALE”; the owners of the old-established firms have gone bust or sold out and retired to simple cottages in the south, their large Italianate mansions in Wood-house, Headingley and Allerton, once silent, wealthy suburbs, pulled down and the gardens chopped up into building estates. Meanwhile, the workmen have remained, living in rows of back-to-back houses around the factories and the mills because they cannot afford to live elsewhere, and hoping that some rich man will come and open again that gaunt and empty building which once brought them and their families a livelihood. And between the industrial communities, scattered in the southern suburbs between Wakefield and Leeds, are a few smoke-blackened farms, with paper-strewn pasturage, whose fences are gapped and footpaths well-trodden by the feet of the unemployed. And somehow in Leeds itself the rain seems always to be falling, gathered on the northern hills around the moors-the moors which not even streets and mills can shut out, reminders to the citizens of a hungry freedom beyond.

You leave the Great Northern Station and turn to the right down Wellington Street, and in no time you are in the City Square. It is just such a City Square as you would imagine Leeds would have. Alfred Dairy’s lamp standards, nudes representing Night and Morning, hold arc lamps, now fitted with drawn-wire bulbs. But nudity still shocks many of the inhabitants. The General Post Office, a large and vulgar affair; the Queen’s Hotel, the Ritz of Leeds, with decorations by J. F. Bentley later to be architect of Westminster Cathedral; and some offices in Portland stone reminiscent of Oxford Street, flank all sides of the square save one, where still stands the Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel—the same chapel in which Priestley preached—an eighteen- forty reminder in black Protestant northern Gothic of the Nonconformist conscience which has made Leeds what it is. And, almost hidden, are the impressive, simple entrance piers to Wellington Station. Trams, trains and tricycle bells and gear changing-if these are the times, then Leeds moves with them.

Yet, what were the times of Leeds? If you walk a short distance from the City Square you will come to Park Square, a delightful eighteenth-century group with Brodrick’s fine Town Hall (1858) rising up behind it, black above the pink brick of the earlier houses. And down by the brown waters of the Aire and Calder Canal you will still see only nineteenth-century mills and warehouses, whose undiversified and solid exteriors are the cathedrals of the industrial north. Beside them, the black, locked Protestant churches with their commodious galleries, Church of England baize and marble monuments to departed manufacturers, seem less like places of worship. “I can’t recollect the time when I did not go to the factory. My father used to drag me there when I was quite a little fellow, in order to wind reels for him.”2 Life centred round the factory all right, and God spake out from the pages of the Old Testament. At the end of the eighteenth century the factories were placed at the east end of the town and the west end was residential. Park Square, Hanover Square, Bedford Place and Queen Square became engulfed in the westward spread.

Let me first consider the nineteenth-century development of Leeds architecturally, for the social aspect must come under the heading of parochialism. On airy Richmond Hill, at the east of the town, houses were built close up against the factories for the workers: rows of two-storeyed houses built back-to-back with no gardens at all and only the cobbled street and the houses opposite to look at. Several families lived in each two-roomed house. Go to the bottom of Nippet Lane and see what the old speculators did. A man named Weller bought a small bit of ground. On it he crammed as many houses as possible, running in straight lines off the main street; Weller Avenue, Weller Grove, Weller Mount, Weller Place, Weller Terrace, Weller Road, Weller View. Sometimes, with touching parental affection, he would bring his children in-Nellie Grove, Back Nellie Grove, Archie Street, Archie Place, Doris Crescent, Back Doris Crescent, or use long words-Stipendiary Street, Industrial Street, Back Cemetery Lane. But the houses would be much the same, just as crowded, only a little more or a little less pretentious, according to their dates, and always among them, like the house of God, black mills and blacker chapels and churches.

So much for the industrial dwellings. The main streets are different. The Kirkgate and the Briggate, once plain shopping districts intersected by shambles, not unlike the streets of Cork or Limerick today, cast off their Georgian glory and assumed the Jacobean, the Romanesque, the Holbeinesque, the Early English, the Perpendicular and the neo-Georgian, in Leeds phorpres brick and stone and terra-cotta. If you wait, sheep-like, in the long queue for the Roundhay tram, you will see more of this, the other side of the picture. Grass appears, the houses spread out, they are higher, they are detached, some have turrets, some have towers, and the larger, finer ones have become municipal property. There was a time when Mr. Peter Fairbairn’s house “Woodsley” was the most lavishly decorated in England. At that time Queen Victoria stayed in it to open Brodrick’s Town Hall. The Illustrated London News shows her admiring a pair of vases, a bust and a portrait in the presence of the owner (later Sir Peter Fairbairn), who was Lord Mayor of Leeds. Those were the days! Melon à la Coburg, Saumon-Balmoral, Bœuf Victoria, Fraises (out of season) Albert Prince Consort, Champagne, Lemonade, Selzer, Claret, Burgundy, Punch. Sitting on a packing case in McConnel’s wine shop you can still imagine it all, while old men who once sent sherry to the grand merchants’ houses hand out double scotches to commercials.

It was in these great days of Leeds that Cuthbert Brodrick was given his opportunity. He built the Town Hall (by far the finest building in the city), the Corn Exchange, the Leeds Institute, the King Street Warehouses, and several private houses. It is unlikely that one whose tastes were for the monumental would have concerned himself with houses, but what Brodrick did accomplish is the best monument a Victorian industrial city can be expected to have, a sequence of noble public buildings in the grand classical manner, before it died down into contemporary blatancy of “naicenesses.”

And now for Leeds parochialism. It is a long story based on temperament and surroundings. To take surroundings first. Leeds has a population of a little over 500,000. It is not a very over-crowded city, it is merely appallingly badly housed. On the deaths from tuberculosis, the infant mortality, and the results of compulsory constipation it is needless to expatiate. The City Council, however, is not without resourcefulness. Under the 1930 Act it decided on a five-year programme; 2,000 of the back-to-back houses were to be demolished in that time and an adequate number of houses erected to replace them. In the first two years of the plan twenty- five were demolished and 942 new ones built. At best it will take 190 years to clear the city of back-to-backs.

The crowded conditions in what Queen Victoria called “this great city” naturally make its poorer inhabitants aware of one another’s lives. You have to know your neighbour opposite on the first floor when you want to string a clothes line across the street to dry your own washing. Each house has its doorsteps yellowed on the edges: thousands of people are content to wait in queues. Leeds is indeed an ants’ nest. And when the King and Queen came in August, 1933, to open the new Civic Hall (quite forty houses must have been demolished to clear the site), some of the saddest, dingiest little lanes had their decorations and hardly an exhausted Wolf Cub or irritated infant was without its red, white and blue favour or Union Jack. I was wandering about in the little lanes of the Richmond Hill Ward (average 2.17 persons per room) as the guns went off which announced the Royal entrance to the city. The courts and alleys where I stood were deserted. Everyone had gone to see the King and Queen. Suddenly bells pealed out under the clouds and even louder than the bells came the cheering. When I approached as near to the centre as I could through the crowds, the sun came out and down the steps of the Town Hall came the Queen in white. The cheers were deafening, hats and flags were waved. The city was alight with excitement. And then when the rain fell in the evening, after the Royal visitors had driven away, back went the crowds to their back-to- backs, “Long Live the King, God Bless our King and Queen.” “It is my earnest hope and prayer that today’s ceremony may prove the beginning of increased prosperity for this great city.” That should be proof enough of Leeds loyalty. And like a loyal parish Leeds did not expose its blemishes that day. It smiled through its illness. I think a city which has such remarkable people should take better care of them.

The remarkable people are only one side of the picture. There is the University closely identified, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, with the city which gave it birth. Here the intellectual life of the north, which produced most engineers, philosophers and poets of nineteenth-century England, finds inadequate embodiment, though the new Parkinson building designed by T. A. Lodge will greatly increase the accommodation. There is also the other fifth of the population which rules the four-fifths. They are Yorkshire people too, and just as loyal and still parochial. If you go out to dinner with one of them up in Roundhay – “dinner is served between 5.30 and 7.30” throughout the town – you will get an insight into their lives. A comfortable semi-detached residence in the Tudor style will welcome you, for the days of detached mansions in their own grounds have passed. And there will be a look round the garden and the wireless after dinner, and talk about Leeds this and Leeds that: the Town Hall is the third longest in the world, the cloth output is the largest in the world, the Civic Hall is the most beautiful Civic Hall in the world.

And from this talk there naturally arises the question of new buildings. The best architects must be got for the best city. So Sir Reginald Blomfield, from London, designed the Headrow, a bold street cut with fine imagination and foresight right from the Town Hall to St. Peter’s Street. The Headrow consists of shops with offices above them. The buildings are constructed of steel and subsequently ornamented with brick and Portland stone, the parapets being diversified by urns. The incline of the Headrow from Victoria Square to the Briggate is rather severe. Here the effect of the stepped roof lines is unpleasing, and there can be no denying that Sir Reginald’s architectural decoration does not look at home in homely Leeds. I found on enquiry that the Headrow was not popular. One can only wonder why the architect did not follow the early nineteenth-century industrial tradition of Leeds, of which there are plenty of examples in side streets and in old engravings and photographs, with Trinity Church as a good example of the use of local material.

But that is perhaps a personal matter. I went to Leeds to see the Civic Hall but there was no seeing the Civic Hall without seeing Leeds at the same time. One can understand why Mr. Vincent Harris was chosen as architect. He had designed the Sheffield Town Hall, and Leeds was not going to be outdone by Sheffield. A site was chosen near the Town Hall, but higher up, so that the new building was bound to dominate the old. Should it attempt to harmonise or give up the struggle? Mr. Vincent Harris is not a Brodrick; that he was in two minds as to what to do is as obvious as are the two steeples with which he terminated his main façade. The result is that the building, looked at with the Town Hall in the foreground, is out of place. The twin steeples are more elaborate than that on the Town Hall-they are a cross between St. Vedast’s, Foster Lane, and St. John’s, Waterloo Road-yet their effect is nullified by the older building. The plain returns and wings look well, but the portico, a necessary justification for twin steeples, mars the otherwise plain and harmonious front. There has been much adverse criticism of the building, particularly from those who have not seen it. But photographs have not done the building justice. The busy streets of Leeds are below. Two main ones almost converge on the building, so that as the sightseer wanders among the hotchpotch of commercial styles around Infirmary Street and the City Square, he suddenly catches a glimpse of one or other brilliant white steeple, rising above tram lines and turrets, terminating an otherwise dreary street. He never sees both steeples at once. What the effect will be when the Portland stone is blackened I cannot say. But I think the odd effect of a close view of the exterior is justified. For the style of the extraordinary gilded clocks I can see less justification. Yet the shrewdest remark of all came from a Yorkshire builder in the bar of the Golden Cock in Kirkgate. “The Civic Hall – you know what that is – a structure of steel; but the Town Hall – that’s architecture, that’s craftsmanship. It’s grown up. There’s no more steel in that than’ld make a lion’s cage.”

2791 words.

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