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.”
1 1933.
2 The Heart of John Middleton, Mrs. Gaskell (1850).
3 Today prefabs spread over the Leeds suburban areas. Quarry Hill Flats, a colossal fortress designed to induce the worker to improve his living conditions, has been turned into a slum.
6 THE ISLE OF MAN
NOT long ago I stepped out of an Edwardian electric tram-car on to the grassy height of Snaefell, two thousand feet above sea-level.The day was clear and I could see Snowdon seventy-three miles away to the south-west and, much nearer, the mountains of Cumberland, the Mull of Galloway and, in the west, the mountains of Mourne—four countries in bluish outline beneath a sky of mother-of-pearl and a wrinkled sea all round us, cloud-patched with streaks of purple.
Four countries seen from a fifth—this ancient kingdom of Man which once owned the Sodor or southern islands of Scotland. The tram-car returned down the mountainside. Many who had landed at the top went into the café for tea or beer and I had, for a moment, the whole island to myself, thirty-two miles long and twelve wide at my feet; brown moorland and mountain in the middle with tiny fields on the lower slopes, green slate and blue slate, silver limestone and red sandstone, gorse and blaeberries and ling, gigantic cliffs and hidden, wooded glens, foxgloves, fern and scabious on Cornish-looking hedges, whitewashed cottages thatched with straw and drowned in fuchsia bushes. It is a bit of Ulster set down in the sea, a bit of England, Scotland, Wales and Cornwall too, a place as ancient as them all, a separate country, Norse and Celtic at once.
The Isle of Man, like Shakespeare, has something memorable for everyone. It is a place of strong contrasts and great variety. Yet in southern England it is hardly known at all.
Yet from June to September half a million people cross from the coast of Lancashire, whole towns at a time. Then lodging houses are stuffed to capacity, then bathing things hang from the sixth floor downwards, then the main road round the island, the famous T.T. track, hums with “charas,” and still there is room. Each time I have visited the Isle of Man it has been at the height of the season and each time I have been able to lose myself in the country. I have tramped knee-deep in blaeberry bushes on the wild west coast of the island, looking in vain for the ruins of a Celtic chapel and never seeing a soul till I turned inland and walked down rutty farm lanes between foxgloves and knapweed to the narrow-gauge railway. And on the same evening I have been able to lose myself again in the crowds on Douglas front, to see Norman Evans in variety at the Palace and afterwards to watch a thousand couples dance in one of the big halls. All this in so small a kingdom, such wildness and such sophistication, such oldness and such newness. The trams, the farms, the switchback railways, the mountain sheep, the fairy lights and the wood-smoke curing kippers—how can I cram them all in?
