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 provethe 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
