Leeds

Gigantic Leeds (1)

Visiting Leeds recently, I found the experience fascinating, and in a way overwhelming. Some of the civic buildings are so large, they’re almost impossible to take in, and are difficult even to cram into the confines of a camera viewfinder. This phenomenon is not unusual in the large cities of northern England, the ones that saw their greatest expansion in the 19th century, but Leeds seems to take the effect to extremes. It’s a place I’ll have to return to, but for now, I’d like to record my impressions of a couple of the city’s most vast and remarkable structures – yes, for once on the English Buildings blog, after the telephone boxes and public lavatories, some truly grand and commanding architecture, structures obvious to the eye and compelling to the attention.

In 1852, a competition was announced for a new town hall building for the centre of Leeds. The demands were extraordinary: a public hall with standing room for 8,000 people, function rooms, reception rooms, a large suite of municipal offices. The whole caboodle was supposed to cost a mere £35,000, and just £200 was offered as the prize for the winning design. So much for so little: the job looked like a poisoned chalice and not many bothered to enter the competition. Charles Barry, who was hired to pick a winner chose the entry from Cuthbert Brodrick, a young unknown architect from Hull.

Brodrick didn’t have much experience, but the burghers of Leeds were impressed by his proposal – a vast complex surrounded by giant classical columns and set on a high plinth. In planning such an important building, the authorities might have insisted that Brodrick work with a more experienced architect, but they accepted him alone and merely asked for some modifications to the design, including the addition of a landmark tower, for which they undertook to provide a few more thousand pounds.

As the new building began to rise, it became clear that Leeds had chosen well. Photographs (imagine me, dear reader, jammed into a doorway opposite in an attempt to stand far enough away to get the whole thing in the frame, and straining to hold the camera high in order to avoid distorting all the columns out of the vertical) do not do it justice and cannot prepare one for the reality. It is enormous. The giant order – perhaps inspired by examples in France, perhaps by Vanbrugh’s giant columns in his country houses – dwarf passers-by, street furniture, double-decker buses. Even visitors from Bradford, which had recently acquired its own large Town Hall, or Liverpool, where St George’s Hall was monumental but smaller, might be impressed. The tower is more or less in proportion with the whole, unified with it by its own order of columns, and topped (after various suggestions by Brodrick) with a baroque eight-sided dome. The whole thing made contemporaries’ jaws drop, and has a similar effect today.

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On the story of this building and its architect, see Derek Linstrum, Towers and Colonnades: The Architecture of Cuthbert Brodrick (Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society, 1999)