Welcome to Leeds - A very Victorian City

Leeds is the home of the greatest football team on earth, but thanks to the industrial revolution and it being a major centre of the woollen and textile trades with its easy connections to the Humber and across the North Sea to Europe, it grew from a fairly small and insignificant settlement to the fourth largest urban area in the UK.

Unlike York, just 25 miles away which is steeped in ancient history stretching back to Roman times, Leeds has no such ties. Throughout the middle-ages and English civil war, militarily, it was of no importance. The huge castle and barracks of Pontefract just 12 miles away which was of a perfect strategic location took care of that but when the Aire and Calder rivers were engineered in 1700 to become navigable, making Leeds in effect, an inland port in what were the beginnings of the modern canal network, the fuse had been lit for an explosion in the city's growth.

By the time Queen Victoria came to the throne in 1837, this industrial textile trading centre was booming. The Leeds and Liverpool canal which opened in 1816 allowed direct passage between the west coast and east coast and with the first railway opening in 1834 and massively expanding throughout the rest of the nineteenth century.

The Victorians loved to splash their wealth creating grandiose, yet stoic architecture and for any scholar of this period, there can be no finer open air classroom than Leeds....

Leeds had always been a large part of my life, through football, college, work and leisure since the 80s when it was a rather shabby and directionless city. The 20th century had brought about a decline as the satanic mills of yore had mostly closed down and much of the working class population were travelling to jobs outside the city but then there began a renaissance, led by the swift rise in popularity of both Leeds University and Leeds Polytechnic which together became the third biggest campus in Europe.

Boom time was back in a Conservative Britain built upon economic freedom after the trade union controlled, imploding industrial landscape of the 70s. With a ready-made base of educated talent at their disposal, many financial service companies made Leeds their home, due to property prices that were a fraction of those to be found in London and even the government, keen to cut costs and 'decentralise' moved the whole of the Department of Health and Social Security 'up North' into a much derided modern version of Brutalist architecture that's locally known as 'The Kremlin'. New buildings began springing up in a massive regeneration of the city centre, as well as old buildings being cleaned and refurbished, traditional Yorkshire Sandstone is not the most durable of materials when it comes to the acrid exhaust fumes of city-centre traffic.

They were exciting times as the skyline filled with tower-cranes, the perfect indicator of a city rising. Trendy apartment blocks and social spaces lined the once purely functional canal-sides as a metamorphosis took place from manufacturing to service industry.

When renowned luxury London, Knightsbridge store Harvey Nicholls announced in 1995 that it was to open its first store outside London, in Leeds. There was incredulity! Would they be selling designer flat-caps and whippets amongst their Chanel and Burberry?

The opening of their store in 1996 cemented Leeds' reputation as being a modern and very wealthy city and many, many other high end brands followed, mainly based around the redeveloped Victorian Quarter which is often called the Knightsbridge of the North.

It has been a number of years since I last wandered around the city centre and against a the backdrop of a dirty grey, wintery sky and almost freezing temperatures took a walk through both the now and the past. I started writing this post as a pictorial guide to classical Victorian architecture but it seems to have developed into a very basic guide on how a city's development is led by a combination of its educational facilities and transport links as much as, if not more than its natural local resources.

With this in mind, most of the pictures that follow are mostly of Victorian structures with accompanying notes and an anecdote or two from back in the day!

Directly opposite the bus station is the Playhouse, with the college of music behind. This location was once the home of the infamous 'Quarry Hill Flats', when built in 1938, the largest social housing complex in the UK and upon demolition just 40 years later, the biggest slum in the UK!

Now a centre for media and the Arts, the BBC and many production companies have studios on the site.

Bonus: Who can tell me the significance of the slogan on the Playhouse wall?

Leeds City Market. No really, its just a market inside with stalls that sell fruit and veg, and 'stuff' like any other market! Built in 1857, it's one of Europe's largest indoor markets.

Read more about it here

The domed roofed building you can see to the left is the Corn Exchange that dates from 1863 but unfortunately was surrounded by road works and scaffolding so I couldn't get a decent picture.

The Victorians needed somewhere to spend their cash so a series of shopping arcades were built, covered to keep the safe from the elements. The forerunners to modern shopping malls. This are was regenerated in the early 90s and given a modern update. Now called the Victorian Quarter, its the home of the most exclusive shops and restaurants in the city. More about that in another post!

All over Leeds you will see the two contrasting uses of building materials albeit both very similar in design. At the rear, another shot of Kirkgate market built in local Yorkshire Sandstone and to the fore, the later use of dressed red brick, again locally produced at one of the many brickworks around Yorkshire.

The Time Ball Buildings were a group of three early 19th century properties combined into one when Dysons, a famous local watch and clockmaker took them over in 1865. It was always a very distinctive building in no small part due to the cantilevered clock with the labelled 'tempus fugit' upon which sits 'Old Father Time' as sculptured by local mason and sculptor, John Wormald Appleyard.

This was a watch and clockmakers shop right until the 1990s when they closed and the shop refurbished and as you can see, its now a takeaway!

The Queens Hotel stands in Leeds City Square and is the impressive flagship hotel that fronts Leeds City railway Station. It's rather an anomaly because the original hotel, built in1863 was pulled down and replaced by the current building in 1937. Its built in a French, Art Deco style and built from Portland Stone and upon completion, was said to be the first hotel in the UK to have en-suite facilities!

Source:Queens Hotel history

City Square is often the first part of Leeds people see due to it being in front of the station and a main road route into the city. Every building is Grade2 listed or better, as are the statues, including this bronze which depicts the Black Prince, Edward, Prince of Wales. It was a commission from the first mayor of Leeds to celebrate Leeds becoming a city and is by renowned English sculptor, Thomas Brook. The casting was actually done in Belgium as no English foundry could cast something of this size and was brought over the North sea and into Leeds via the River Aire.

The Black Prince's link to Leeds? Absolutely no links at all!

Also in City Square is this building, it's been a bar as long as I remember but the only bar I know with incredible statues looking out over the balustrades, It was originally a simple branch of the Yorkshire Bank! Banks using your money to fund extravagant follies has always been a thing!

References and further reading on City Square, Leeds, here

Most of the major civic buildings in Leeds stand along or around The Headrow, and this is the very impressive Town Hall, called the town hall as it was built between 1853 and 1858, long before Leeds was granted City status in 1893. It was built with courts and a prison and with chambers, halls and when its not being refurbished and cleaned as it is every 10 years or so, is home to a huge range of cultural and civic events including daily organ recitals and the Internationally renowned Music Festival.

Here's a better photo courtesy of www.planetradio.co.uk

Sadly, I couldn't go inside so from www.leeds.gov.uk is a picture of the organ, one of the world's largest and some idea of the interior which is just as, if not impressive than the exterior.

Finally on the subject of the town hall, if you think it has an air of familiarity about it, Cuthbert Broderick's design has been taken as a reference and used to create many similar buildings all over the world including New York State Capitol, Philadelphia City Hall and Parliament House, Melbourne.

References and further reading on Leeds Town Hall here

Next to the Town Hall is Leeds City Library and then adjoining, the Art Gallery which is a much later extension, sympathetically designed to compliment its host.

And yes, the sculpture outside is an original Henry Moore bronze, who was born just down the road in Castleford entitled: Reclining Woman: Elbow and was created for especially for the museum in 1981, just 5 years before his death. The museum now houses a huge collection of Moore's works.

Also sitting on the Headrow is this large building that was formerly the head office of the Leeds Permanent Building Society but is now a high end hotel and leisure complex. The design theme of this building runs all the way down all the buildings on the Headrow and back to the bus station...

...but NOT Victorian. No, they were built in the 1930's, very much in keeping with the style of the city and sympathetic to the need to not distract from the civic splendour of the Victorian period, which was only 30 years previously.

It's amazing the number of stunning buildings from such a short period of time all in one place. Half of the city has Grade 1 and 2 protection to sae it for future generations. I could have made this post go on for ever!

I hope you've enjoyed this quick trip around Leeds' Victorian heritage. I probably got more out of it than you did as it gave me a renewed interest and pride in so much of the city I've always taken for granted. I can't understand why more tourists don't visit as its also a wonderful springboard for the rest of God's own county and our stunning and diverse range of man-made and natural beauty. I look forward to going back and delving a little deeper next time.

Thanks so much for dropping by and best wishes to all
@nathen007

ALL photos were taken by apart from the two stated and all sources of reference have been given in links. This post has been added to the wonderful www.pinmapple.com