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, Headingly 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
