Now! Then! The Bloomsbury Group’s Amabel Williams-Ellis finds little art for art’s sake in Leeds

12 April 1924: The Bloomsbury Group’s Amabel Williams-Ellis finds little art for art’s sake in Leeds

Amabel Williams-Ellis. 1924/04/12. Through the Smoke. Spectator. London. Get it:

Excerpt

There is a difference between Leeds and Sheffield. Both, though less dirty than, say, Wigan or Burnley, are black and shabby beyond the imagination of those who have not seen an English industrial town, both are practically without any sort of visible beauty, but in Leeds there are palpable, visible and even impressive signs that “the desperate needs of everyday” are being attended to. In Sheffield, at least to the casual visitor, there are no signs of such provision. It is an interesting and curious experience to meet day after day, as I did in Sheffield, Hull and Leeds, charming, sensible, even deeply imaginative people – the intelligentsia of the town – who appear never to have experienced any emotion connected with the beauty that appeals to the eye. For it is not that they prefer what I think ugly. That is perfectly comprehensible. But to them one page of print is as good as another page, to them every picture tells a story, and a façade may represent sane provision for physical needs, financial solvency, civic decency or pride, but never and in no circumstances can it represent beauty. I was told a story of an alderman of the last generation whose favourite boast it was that the whole of the Art Gallery cost less per annum than the heating of the Town Hall. But that story was told me by a curator, and after a time I began to doubt if it would have seemed funny to the average businessman.

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To facilitate reading, the spelling and punctuation of elderly excerpts have generally been modernised, and distracting excision scars concealed. My selections, translations, and editions are copyright.
Abbreviations:

ER: East Riding
GM: Greater Manchester
NR: North Riding
NY: North Yorkshire
SY: South Yorkshire
WR: West Riding
WY: West Yorkshire

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Original

Once, when the achievement of Victorian industrialism seemed at its zenith – at the moment of its highest prosperity – the most celebrated Victorian writer on the arts admitted in a moment of candour that England was comparable to a beleaguered city, “where only the grave and desperate needs of everyday” can be attended to. It is with an echo of these ominous words in his mind that the traveller will return from a visit to Sheffield and Leeds.

You will not be long in either town before you shed away any fanciful liking you may have had for whims and flourishes in the visual arts. In the past you may often have turned from the sound and second-rate in pictures, statues, architecture, painting. Now you will look back through the smoke at your old self, wonder that you were not more thankful for small mercies, and will hail the mildest effort with enthusiasm. I say “visual arts” because in both towns there is a feeling for literature and music, and for literature especially as it expresses itself through the drama, but of that more presently.

It is an interesting and curious experience to meet day after day, as I did in Sheffield, Hull and Leeds, charming, sensible, even deeply imaginative people – the intelligentsia of the town – who appear never to have experienced any emotion connected with the beauty that appeals to the eye. For it is not that they prefer what I think ugly. That is perfectly comprehensible. But to them one page of print is as good as another page, to them every picture tells a story, and a façade may represent sane provision for physical needs, financial solvency, civic decency or pride, but never and in no circumstances can it represent beauty.

I was told a story of an alderman of the last generation whose favourite boast it was that the whole of the Art Gallery cost less per annum than the heating of the Town Hall. But that story was told me by a curator, and after a time I began to doubt if it would have seemed funny to the average business man.

And so if I say no more of public buildings and squares the reader must not think that I have abandoned my fanciful notion that a town should be a place to live in. I still believe that where man has substituted his work for that of nature he has failed if he does not substitute beauties of his own making for those natural beauties which a town must thrust out. The point is simply that if one is to write anything but a jeremiad about Leeds and Sheffield one must for the moment abandon this position. I also started with the generally accepted idea that besides seemliness and beauty the other criterion by which we might judge the sane city is the abundance and variety of recreation that it provided for its young inhabitants. Here I think Leeds deserves a better reputation.

At Leeds there is even an attempt at modernity and chic in the world of amusement – an effort against the old-fashioned dowdiness that is apt to seize upon all English people when they play. On one side this new alertness shows itself in the wonderful list of productions which the Leeds Art Theatre has to its credit. This society has, for instance, produced plays by Conrad, Shaw, Galsworthy, Gordon Bottomley, Tchekov, Maeterlinck and Strindberg. All lovers of the drama will look forward greatly to next season’s list, and will most sincerely hope that nothing will make the Leeds Art Theatre lower the standard of artistic first-rateness which it has here planted. It is so easy to substitute Barrie for Shaw, and Sutro for Wilde.

At the other end of the scale of recreations and almost, though not quite, as good of its kind, is the Majestic Cinema, a big and important, if ugly, house, which shows nearly good films, and has a restaurant attached. Here people can dance and wear their smart clothes without feeling foolish, either at tea, dinner or supper.

As for outdoor amusements, that subject is bound up with the really interesting and hopeful side of Leeds activities, the great housing and town-planning scheme upon which the municipality is engaged. Mr. Charles Lupton, who took me round, is the Chairman of the Improvements Committee, and is a man equally remarkable for his vision, his understanding of his town as a whole, and the determination and persistence with which he insists upon the materialization of his dreams.

Leeds lies in the valley of a river, at a point where the hills stand back a little, the river valley narrowing both above and below. At the time of the great industrial expansion, houses, factories and warehouses were all crowded together in the river valley, a fine congestion of back-to-back houses and narrow and tortuous streets being produced by “pressure” from the hills up which the speculative builder was unwilling that his houses should climb. The city’s development till some fifteen years ago followed the usual course. The richer inhabitants bought large estates on the surrounding hills and escaped to them out of the smoke of this central district. Gradually the speculative builder followed them, but this time with rather superior dwellings, intended for the salary-drawer rather than for the wage-earner. From straggling suburbs thus formed roads led down star fashion into Leeds, but there were no circular roads, so that to get to one suburb from another you had to descend and go through the main city, which grew constantly more congested and more grimy as the number of mills increased. Then came the men of the present generation, among them the Mr. Charles Lupton. We will take him to typify the town-planning spirit in Leeds. He saw that the state of the city was intolerable. Smoke abatement seeming then impracticable (it seems so still to many people in Leeds) he conceived the idea of moving the population bodily out on to the hills above the smoke line. It was calculated that the smoke rose to a height of 200 feet, the hills rose to 400 feet, and at this height there was a considerable plateau area. He determined that it was in this way and not by sprawling further down the valley that Leeds should grow, and it was to these areas that he intended to move out the population from the centre of the town. Everything has been considered – communication by road and train, water supply, open spaces and schools for the new satellites, and now the work of the Improvement Committee has borne fruit. At Middleton, Crossgates, Meanwood, Hawkesworth Wood, and Wyther Estates large satellite villages have been built, or are in course of construction. Leeds is approached by the workers who live in them through woods belonging to the corporation. The outskirts are served by corporation tramways, while a great road, in many places 120 feet wide, and always planted with trees, encircles the whole scheme, provides communication between satellite and satellite, between them and the larger open spaces where golf courses, &c., are to be found, and deflects all motor traffic from the area of busy local traffic.

Leeds people seem to have supported the Improvements Committee in a remarkable way; again and again I was told, “Here is land that was given to the corporation, either as an open space or for building – as we choose,” or “These woods we hold in trust”; “This was sold to us for a song.” The magnitude, sanity and clear-headedness of the undertaking has appealed to people, as well it might.

Readers who are interested will, by the way, have an opportunity of seeing a model of the whole scheme at Wembley.

The magnitude of the problem of our growing population appears in the following figures. About 3,500 houses have been erected, the yearly average per year being 1,024. But the increase in population for the last census decade is 13,170. As this is in some part accounted for by an enlargement of the city boundaries, it is considered that 500 houses a year will meet the increase. Therefore, even after its great effort, Leeds has only been able to substitute about 1,700 good houses in suitable positions for 1,700 bad houses in unsuitable positions. It is a pity that it is to our birth per thousand that attention is always paid, and not to net increases of population. For the increase is in arithmetical progression, and the birth-rate must fall much more rapidly than it yet shows signs of doing if we are to have a stabilized population. In a few years, that is, unless we establish the principle of birth control or voluntary parenthood, Leeds will find that she will have to build not 500, but 600 houses yearly, and then 700 and so on, before she can begin the great work of civilizing and improving. When shall we realize that it is not so much that our houses are too few for us as that we are too many for our houses?

A. Williams-Ellis.

1617 words.