Architecture and Morality

I have been wandering around Leeds city centre at lunchtimes since the start of the year.

Given that one can only get so far and still have enough time to get back to the office, as you can probably imagine, the novelty soon wore off.

However, seeing as I am doing it for exercise – having cancelled my gym membership at the end of the year – I have been persevering with it, while trying to find new ways of making it interesting.

First off, I am listening to my Michel Thomas German language course a lot. All I need to take this to the next level (as we say whilst inwardly dying in management meetings) is find someone else who wants to speak German and start speaking to them. In German.

Right now, all I’m doing is walking about whispering to myself – which is, of course, the international language of the mental patient.

Secondly, I am looking up.

Most of the people shuffling around the city streets rarely raise they eyes above the level of the shop-fronts. I, however, have been looking at the uppermost parts of Leeds’ buildings and I’ve reached two conclusions:

1. There is a hell of a lot of vacant commercial property in the city centre - so if you need business premises, you should be able to get a very good deal.

2. If you flooded or buried Leeds to a depth of about 15 feet, you'd actually be left with quite a beautiful place.

There are some really fascinating buildings around which you would never give a second glance to because of the staggeringly banal contents of their ground floors. The most extreme example of former "oooh" and present "meh" surely has to be the one-time Jubilee Hotel on The Headrow – now the "Red Leopard" lapdancing establishment.

My personal favourite is St Paul’s House in Park Square (right). It looks like the Doge’s Palace, only with an “office space to let” sign pinned to the outside.

The Leeds City Markets building (at the top) would not look out of place in Paris or Vienna, despite being inhabited primarily by people offering to unlock stolen mobile phones. And the Town Hall is also a thing of beauty.

THEN, you look at what’s in between these brilliant examples of Victorian ambition and craftsmanship and you realise that if the Victorians were wrong about one thing, it was that history moves forwards towards a better future. 

Pretty much every building from the 20^th century onwards looks horrendous, cheap and nasty.  The court buildings look like they’ve been made out of Lego, for example. And they probably have. 

“Ah, here he goes again, imagining the past was SO MUCH BETTER than the present”, I hear you say. “The reason why old buildings look better than modern ones is that the crap old buildings fell down or were knocked down years ago.”

Please excuse any Prince Charles tendencies here. Some modern buildings are indeed impressive and beautiful in their own way. The Gherkin in London is quite something.

But – to me - they are things you look at and say “that’s a clever statement” rather than “that is a work of art”. Same as the difference between Tracey Emin’s bed and a Caravaggio.

 So, present-day architects: more stone-work please. More domes. More intricacy, less concept please. OK?

Tetley Brewery - or what's left of it

Another thing you notice about Leeds’ buildings is how many of them are completely derelict. I’m not talking about boarded up shops – I mean entire city blocks of buildings going to ruin. The whole area just north of the bus station, for example, around Templar Street and Lady Lane.

Clearly, no one is going to buy them or rent them in their present condition. So why not demolish them?

In fact, here’s an early policy for my future dictatorship. If a building is left unoccupied for more than a year, it has to be EITHER opened up to homeless people OR blown up and returned to nature until someone can think of something worthwhile to put there instead.