Celebrating Leeds As It Builds the Slums of Tomorrow?
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28 The Yorkshire and Humber Regional Review Winter 2009 Celebrating Leeds as it builds the slums of tomorrow? There are many possible walking routes around central Leeds that allow residents and visitors to observe some of the undoubted success stories but also to contemplate some of the problems accompanying rapid development and regeneration. Ongoing debate about successes and failures is healthy if this leads to better understanding of the forces, both national and local, that shape the contemporary townscape and that may prevent costly mistakes from being made in future. Graham Haughton’s tour takes us westward along the waterfront from Leeds City Station to Clarence Dock. eeds has a fine history of sponsored developed at a pace which has had little to do with traditional celebratory accounts of the city’s market drivers and everything to do with the insatiable appetite Lseemingly progressive future-looking of residential speculators for formulaic apartments.... activities. Who can forget Project Leeds: developers have continued to deliver untold amounts of Britain’s Motorway City of the Seventies standard investor product with a number of significant (Leeds City Council, 1971), for instance. consequences: most apartments look the same, some lie empty There have been many other such accounts on completion, there is a complete lack of product diversity which, with the benefit of hindsight, come to and the quality of the buildings which have been delivered has Graham look rather quaint. The Leeds Tercentenary not, on the whole, been high enough to attract or keep Haughton, Official Handbook (Hirst, 1926), for instance, homemakers” (Jonathan Morgan, in Stillwell and Unsworth, University has sections entitled The ‘Do-it-all’ 2008, p. 127). of Hull Corporation and The Romance of Municipal These problems had been foreseen as far back as 2006, when Services. the architect Maxwell Hutchinson kick-started a much needed Leeds and its History: Three Hundred public debate when he declared some of the new apartment Years of Achievement , published by the Yorkshire Post in 1926, developments were likely to become ‘the slums of the future’ opens a chapter on open spaces with the ringing declaration (see http://www.bbc.co.uk/leeds/content/articles/2006/09/13/ that “The provision of open spaces for the recreation of the skyline_inside_out_feature.shtml , which includes Hutchinson’s people is a purely modern function of a municipal Corporation. programme). And naturally so” (p.124). By 2008, this phrase had become part of common parlance The 1973 Leeds Planning Handbook notes that “Many locally, picked up by The Times, for instance, in an interview corners of Leeds are derelict or just untidy.... In recent years with a local estate agent (see http://www.timesonline.co.uk/ the Council has reclaimed nearly 100 acres of derelict land... tol/money/property_and_mortgages/article3905055.ece ). and hopes to treat the remaining 260 acres by 1981 in its With most new development stalled, some properties largely reclamation programme. When reclaimed this land is used unsold or unlet, and prices reported to have slumped massively mainly to provide parks and playing fields” (Leeds Town from the peak of the property boom, the city centre boom has Planning Division, 1973, p. 45). Such high hopes and fine ideals. faltered — but it is too easy to blame the national property In the past few years there has been an outpouring of similar slump. In Leeds the boom years produced too much sub- celebratory accounts (e.g. Ibbotson, 2009; Wainwright, 2009) standard development, with poor design of both buildings and which are already looking premature, as the credit crunch their surrounding areas, notably with limited provision of social reveals the largely unsustainable basis of the Leeds growth infrastructure (GPs, schools, local shops), poor quality public project. space and inadequate provision of green space for residents. Whilst preparing for a walking tour this October, I bought Too many of the residential blocks are badly sited, some some of the recently published offerings and was surprised by practically islands surrounded by busy and noisy roads, with how uncritical some of the content was. Of course there are little stepback or attempts at acoustic dampening to attenuate some good quality developments in the city centre and these the noise and pollution problems. One survey (Unsworth et al., can rightly be celebrated as in the recent RIBA publication, 2007) found 40 per cent owner occupation, though this figure which is heavily supported by the City Council and various need careful interpretation, not least in the light of the high private developers (Wainwright, 2009). vacancy rates in certain developments which are likely to lead Combining the celebratory and the critical more effectively is to an underestimation in the amount of rented properties. a recent commercially supported book which provides walking Others have estimated owner-occupied housing as being only tours around the city centre and is much more candid about 5-20 per cent of the total (see the two BBC and Times websites some of the problems that still face the city (Stillwell and articles cited above), with the main market being absentee Unsworth, 2008). landlords providing short-term accommodation for young Especially notable is this book’s use of inset commentaries to singles and couples, few families moving in, many flats empty provide a range of different viewpoints, including an achingly for long periods, and others used mainly as weekday second honest assessment of some of the standards of recent homes. This has allowed Leeds City Council off the hook in development by Jonathan Morgan of Morgans City Living: “Let’s seeming to meet some of its Government-set housing targets, be honest: the second wave of city living in Leeds has but done nothing to create sustainable communities. Winter 2009 The Yorkshire and Humber Regional Review 29 It is in this context that I offer to readers an alternative tour of stands empty, unable to attract buyers prompting the overseas Leeds city centre, which takes in some of the parts that other owners to mothball the development until the market improves publications did not reach. (http://www.propertyweek.com/story.asp? sectioncode=530&storycode=3112434&c=3 ). For all that the new block apparently enjoys marvellous views, North of the River Aire it is possibly the worst example of urban development and poor planning in the city centre and it is no surprise that prices at City My tour starts to the west of the railway station, north of the river Island have plummeted since it was built Aire, where a series of developments have sprung up along the (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/money/ river and main roads, some now occupied, some part empty, property_and_mortgages/article3905055.ece ). one standing empty. The ‘City Island’ development is What is frustrating here is that the original City Island architecturally the most notable of these. As the initial flats were development was reasonably good for central Leeds, providing being built, it soon became clear what an amazing new addition good urban space in the courtyard area, decent garden space to the city roofscape this could have been. and even some allotments and car parking well out of public The two curved buildings faced each other around a central sight. It is not perfect; it is hard to get to by foot or bike and, for courtyard, with a stepped roofscape creating what might the moment, is largely impermeable as a site to the rest of the variously be imagined as a pagoda style or something city, as residents are protected by large walls, locked gates, reminiscent of a medieval hilltop village in southern France or CCTV and security guards. This of course relates to one of Tuscany, enjoying north facing views over the river and the Leeds’ carefully kept little secrets, that this part of the canal Leeds Liverpool canal (Figure 1). towpath, though celebrated in much of the property publicity, is seen locally as a crime hotspot. On nearby Wellington Road/Street is a large new development which with its substantial and unimaginative use of vertical and horizontal lines and its general impenetrability somehow reminds me of a prison block more than a residential development (I have nicknamed it ‘B Block’ as I could not find the name on the outside of the building)(Figure 3). Figure 1. Fancifully, a Tuscan village roofscape Cycling towards it along the Sustrans canal towpath route truly raised the spirits, it looked inspiring. For a year. And then a massive, new block of flats was built up right in front of it, which skilfully combines the architectural subtlety of a grain silo and a public urinal. This now obscures the river and canal views for those in the earlier flats and, for the general public, takes away the whole majesty of the former skyline (Figure 2). Figure 3. Close-up of bleak western frontage of ‘B Block’ The frontage facing the proposed Wellington Place development is a design abomination, presenting a largely blank wall to the street, denying engagement and interaction with passers-by. It offends most urban design principles, such as permeability, local context and respecting local buildings. In mitigation, the other side of the building has retail outlets including a supermarket on the ground floor, creating some interaction with the public domain. The proposed massive Wellington Place development is currently stalled, but to their credit the developers are grassing over parts of the area for the duration and have provided a five- a-side pitch (see foreground in Figure 2). A well-designed new footbridge crosses the River Aire linking these developments to the south central area of Leeds. One of Figure 2. More prosaic: City Island, the buildings to the left, phase the two buildings to the north of the bridge reflects well the 2 building to the right blocking views north to canal and River Aire recent Leeds tendency to provide ostentatious penthouse suites, which flaunt the wealth of their residents.