Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (3): Start small, build big

In 1884, Michael Marks, who had arrived shortly before as a refugee from the Russian Partition of Poland, opened a ‘penny bazaar’ in the Kirkgate Market in Leeds. In a penny bazaar, every item cost the same: Marks’ slogan was ‘Don’t ask the price. It’s a penny.’ Ten years later he went into partnership with Thomas Spencer, a former clerk for the wholesaler Isaac Dewhirst, who had supplied Marks with goods (and helped him with his English) when he started out in business. Marks and Spencer soon expanded their business and by 1904 had taken on their first shop. One of the great retailing names had arrived on Britain’s high streets.

Today’s Marks & Spencer in Kirkgate Market, looks similar to the original penny bazaar, but the Victorian version may have been rather larger. When I was there it was closed, but be assured, this is a functioning shop, and it seemed to have gifts and confectionery for sale inside. In that respect it’s like neither the original bazaar (which offered anything Marks could sell for a penny – hair pins, dyes, black lead…) nor the typical contemporary M&S store, with its specialisms in clothing and food. But it’s interesting that the business commemorates its humble origins, and the shiny paint, gilt capitals and bold lettering suggest they are proud of the man who arrived as a refugee and made a fortune and built something amounting to a national institution.

Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (2): Doing the office proud

This building not far from the gigantic town hall in Leeds is grand, but not gigantic, and compared to its more famous neighbour, it’s on a small scale. It’s the sort of thing that still survives here and there in Britain’s large cities: a compact office block in the Gothic style. For Leeds, it has a special significance because it is said to be the first dedicated block of office chambers in the city. It was built in the late 1860s and housed the offices of Charles Fowler, a Leeds surveyor who also acted as architect on some buildings. He may well have designed this one.

It is not an unusual building for the 1860s: Gothic in style, red brick with stone dressings, and quite ornate. Its triple lancet sash windows have slender stone shafts that hold up stone arches. The windows on the ground floor also sit above a stretch of wall that’s stone and decorated with quatrefoils. These are more quatrefoils in the stretch of parapet at the top of the building between the two gables.

But the really striking feature is the doorway. This is pointed, with a cinquefoil inner arch and two pairs of shafts. Around the main arch run several bands of carved ornament – a mixture of dogtooth and stylised leaves. All this is the kind of thing seen on medieval Gothic arches too, but the difference is the band containing the name, Britannia Buildings. You would not normally see such a name panel on a medieval structure, and if there were an inscription it would certainly not use the very Victorian letterform that features here, with its fancy capitals – very rounded Bs, a curly G, and an I with extra ornament halfway up.* With such a bold architectural statement, we can have no doubt where we are. 

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* It’s worth clicking on the photograph to enlarge it.

Leeds

Small-scale Leeds (1): Time for shopping

One of the things I’d like to do while travel is restricted is to make some virtual revisits to places I’ve mentioned before on the blog, but which deserve more coverage. A good example is the fascinating city of Leeds – which I covered in September 2019 as ‘Gigantic Leeds’. Maybe it’s time for a short selection of samples of Leeds on a smaller scale.

My first is one of the half-dozen arcades in the city. It’s Thornton’s Arcade, built as part of a development that included some offices and the City Varieties Music Hall, in the Victorian period. Back then, shopping was becoming very much the leisure activity it was in the 20th century, and many cities were building arcades, where people could shop away from the bustle, traffic, noise, and mess of the streets. Such an idea had an obvious appeal to late-Victorian and Edwardian women, who wore long dresses that could get muddied – and worse – on busy and horse-bound city streets, and who liked the idea of a safe, covered environment in which to shop. 

Architect George Smith produced a narrow but comfortable small arcade with an iron and glass roof, which, like that of a railway station, ensured that the interior was flooded with natural light. So shoppers could see where they were going – and what was on display in the shop windows – and security staff could keep a watch for pickpockets, a menace that, years after Oliver Twist, was still very much with us.

The roof is pointed and its is supported by and rests on unusual horseshoe-shaped trusses. These trusses, similar to the one visible in my picture, are painted blue and take the viewer into a different world – the kind of mild orientalism that reminds me that the bazaar in one of James Joyce’s short stories was called ‘Araby’.

At the far end is the piece de resistance: a clock with cast-iron automata. The figures include Richard Coeur de Lion, Robin Hood, Gurth the Swineherd, and Friar Tuck,† and are drawn from the once very familiar Robin Hood stories, in particular as made popular by Sir Walter Scott’s novel Ivanhoe. Potts and Sons (eminent clockmakers who sold public clocks nationwide but were based in Leeds) manufactured the clock and the figures (almost life-size – not quite so small-scale, then) were done by J. W. Appleyard, a Leeds stone-carver and sculptor. Clocks were invaluable in a period when owning a watch was by no means universal, and the colourful tableau also turned the timepiece into a bit of entertainment – another example of the tendency for shopping to become – as fitting in an arcade next to a music hall – part of the entertainment industry.

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† Friar Tuck has presumably pulled up his habit to give him freedom of movement as he does his share of the heavy work of striking the bells.

Before and after

Eric Musgrave, Leeds Then and Now
Published by Pavilion Books

Leeds Then and Now is one of a stable of books featuring paired photographs of buildings and streets from great cities, each pair accompanied by succinct and informative text. They’re not the first books to take this approach, but they are certainly among the best. The quality comes through most immediately in terms of the visuals, well chosen historical images from a range of dates, some as old as the 1860s, some as recent as the 1970s, twinned with excellent photographs of the same scenes today taken by David Major. The text for each pair of images is succinct and informative. Both author and photographer have local roots and their knowledge of and pride in Leeds shines through.

The range of subjects extends from the city’s major buildings – such as the Corn Exchange, Town Hall, and City Market – to lesser structures that form part of the complex mix that makes up most of the central streets of Leeds. Impressed on a recent visit how well the greatest of the buildings are standing up to the trials of modern life, I turned to the pages on the Town Hall. Here, a photograph of 1905 shows Cuthbert Brodrick’s monumental urban temple substantially the same, less hemmed by signs and bollards than it is today, but without the trees that now soften its corners. The Corn Exchange is likewise slightly encumbered with signs compared to earlier, but the great sweep of street that runs up to it is still largely clear, and similar to how it was apart from one modern interloper. Another big building, the mock-Egyptian Temple Works, was looking dark and soot-blackened in 1935, but at least you could see it – when the ‘now’ photograph was taken the main block was hidden behind scaffolding and protective plastic; the frontage has also acquired railings that weren’t there in the 1930s. One hopes that the works will be restored and thrive, as have most of the city’s fine arcades like the Grand, Cross, and County, the latter a masterpiece of the great architect Frank Matcham, normally at work designing theatres. An image of 1949, however, shows the striking Victoria Arcade, one that has been lost.

I can get annoyed with a plethora of intrusive modern signs, but a look at the some the street views shows how much interesting signage we have lost. The losses range from Victorian and Edwardian monsters to more elegant bits of Art Nouveau, not to mention some jazzy signs from the 1930s onwards. A stretch of Briggate, for example, displayed enormous signs, with letters almost six feet high, across the upper floors of the Cash Boot Company in 1944. These signs are long gone, and the part of the front that remains has been cleaned so that its bricks and stone gleam; also gleaming is a facade of 2010 fronting one shop, a completely glass-clad front butting comfortably up against brick, stone and terracotta.

So Leeds Then and Now shows us some of what has been lost – stretches of Gothic or Renaissance shops demolished in the 20th century, 16th or 17th century merchants’ premises knocked down by the Victorians, Dickensian enclaves such as Rotation Office Yard, a striking Victorian market hall, the dazzling timber-framed premises of the Universal Furnishing Company, and so on and on. But it also makes us look more closely at what is still there, from details of 19th century shops to the City Markets (still fulfilling their function) to the Third White Cloth Hall, which is now a Pizza Express. Meanwhile we can weigh up for ourselves whether we’re grateful for some of the new building or in mourning for demolished architectural glories; sad about the vanished Victorian shop signs or pleased that the buildings beneath them can be more clearly seen. Either way, the book is a feast, and will encourage readers not only to study its engaging images further, but also to look carefully at what’s left – in my case by making further visits to Leeds.

Leeds

Gigantic Leeds (3)

In his book Historic Architecture of Leeds, Derek Linstrum begins his entry on this building with the words, ‘One of the best-known exceptions to the rule of simple functional buildings for industry is Temple Mills.’ Which is true, though it doesn’t tell the whole story. Little could be further from the usual functional brick walls and repeating rows of regular windows of the normal Victorian textile mill than this facade, with its slightly sloping walls, massive columns with papyrus or lotus capitals, and winged solar discs. It’s riding a wave of the ancient Egyptian revival, and it’s the work of Joseph Bonomi, who came from Durham but had Italian ancestors on his father’s side. That father, also Joseph, was an architect, and there was a brother, Ignatius, who was a prominent architect too. The young Joseph was better known as an artist and Egyptologist. He would have been familiar with the temple at Edfu, on which the facade of Temple Mills was based. Massive and weatherbeaten, his building is one to stop you in your tracks, and no doubt the mill’s owner, John Marshall, wanted to make just such a memorable statement. In a city of big buildings, it more than holds its own.

But a factory is more than a statement, and this mill were unusual in another way. Inside, it’s laid out very much along up-to-date lines for 1838, with rows of iron columns well spaced to accommodate machines for spinning linen yarn. In addition, as a single-storey building, it can be top lit, so Bonomi, or perhaps the engineer with whom he worked, John Combe, specified row upon row of glazed domes set in vaults, an brilliant and original way to spread natural light on to the factory floor beneath. In a final bravura touch, grass was grown on the roof, and a flock of sheep ranged across it, stepping between the domes and cropping the greenery to keep it short. This too is a functional feature – the grass roof helped maintain the humidity that was beneficial to flax-working, keeping the thread supple – and the sheep helped maintain the grass. As sheep don’t take to climbing stairs, a hydraulic lift was installed to get the creatures up to their aerial grazing grounds. Add to this steam heating and baths for the workers, and you have the model of a 19th-century functional mill, albeit in an ancient Egyptian package.

‘You couldn’t make it up,’ as they say. But Bonomi, Combe, and Marshall did make it up, all 18 Egyptian columns and 66 glass domes and what was, when it was built, the largest room in Europe. So the mill was much admired, but it was never as successful as Marshall hoped. A slump in textile prices, together with a period of poor management and poorer industrial relations, saw the business decline and the mill was sublet in the 1870s. Empty and fragile now, it remains a memorial to the optimism and flair of its creators and the city as a whole, a place I’ve called Gigantic Leeds.

Leeds

Gigantic Leeds (2)

My second gigantic and over-the-top building in Leeds is the Corn Exchange, another enormous structure by Cuthbert Brodrick and, like the Town Hall, a design that won a competition. Brodrick based it in the Halle au Blé in Paris, a domed circular building that had already inspired a major structure in London, the Coal Exchange by John Bunning, a masterpiece that John Betjeman tried unsuccessfully to save from demolition in the 20th century. Brodrick’s Leeds building, though, is elliptical with three semicircular protrusions that mark the entrances. While the Halle au Blé had a classical design with quite plain detailing, the Corn Exchange in Leeds is probably closer to baroque, with its gigantic size, its varying curves, and the monumental treatment of its masonry.

The exterior is of sandstone ashlar and the masonry is imposing, if not almost overwhelming in its finish. Most of the blocks are rusticated and carved to form diamonds pointing outwards; decoration includes swags and paterae; the clock is surrounded by garlands. The identifying inscription, by contrast, is in a dead plain sans serif letterform that seems to mean business.

And this was also, when it was originally completed in the 1863, a highly practical, businesslike building, housing a ring of offices for the corn factors around the perimeter and a large open market space accommodating stands for the factors in the centre. A balcony running around the walls half way up gives access to a further collection of offices, and above that is the vast dome, its structure largely visible from within and its great sweep dominated by two openings – a huge oval window that forms part of Brodrick’s design and an additional window like a vast curving slit, that is a later modification and adds another touch of eccentricity to this highly original building.

Since the Corn Exchange ceased to be used for trading in grain in the 1980s, it has undergone two restorations to attempt to adapt it for retail use. On the face of it, the result seems successful. The rings of offices convert easily to small shops without destroying the integrity of the building, and the open areas lend themselves well to café or restaurant use. However, the trading areas seemed very quiet when I visited and I do hope they weather the current difficult time for retailing in Britain. Brodrick’s building deserves to survive and deserves to be used.

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)