Leeds has always felt, to me, a city that is hard to pin down.
It suffered more than most from the crazed frenzy of Post-War planners, even branding itself the Motorway City of the 70s. It holds the dubious title of the largest city in Western Europe without a light rail network.
Yet its condensed centre is eminently walkable, and at its heart, one of the most stunning concentrations of Victorian architecture in the country.
Stand in the city’s centrepiece – the elegant County and Cross Arcades, fanning off the glass-topped Queen Victoria Street – and it’s hard to imagine the place as anything other than a monument to a city sure of itself.
Even if the shops that line it are well out of my budget, it’s beautiful, breathtaking even.
But as with Victorian architecture anywhere, it isn’t quite as simple as beauty and extravagance. It’s a story of what it replaced – the homes of an Irish tailor’s assistant called Patrick, Russian-Jewish families like the Finebergs, butchers like James Butler. Generations of families, their homes turned to rubble, out of which rose the arcades that Leeds is now rightly proud of.
I wanted to know how this came about, and what happened to those people. But to tell that story properly, I have to start with the arcades themselves, and the city that built them.
This blog is part of my Building of the Week series, where I explore a different story each week.
A city explodes with growth and ambition
Like many of England’s other great industrial cities, until relatively recently, Leeds was really little more than a small town.
This started to change in the 18th century, as its wool trade boomed and then snowballed in the 19th, when the industrial revolution brought in a period of rapid growth.
By the 1850s, what had not long before been home to around 30,000 people, was now home to more than 100,000. By 1901 it was half a million.
Workers flocked to the city, and huge slums sprang up. The urban landscape of this period is still legible today.
The medieval burgage plots, long, narrow strips of land running back from the main street, had over the centuries been subdivided into yards. These were progressively filled with cheap workers’ cottages and the back-to-back houses that came to define industrial Leeds. “Yards” can still be found on many modern Leeds city centre addresses.
Central Leeds gets a Victorian makeover
As Leeds grew and became wealthier, it began to grow in ambition, too. Its main street, pretty much since the town was chartered in 1207, has been Briggate.
It was the route into the city for visitors, but leading off it was a warren of yards and lanes, including the Shambles, Leeds’s medieval meat market.
They were among the most densely packed and unsanitary slums in the city, a hotbed for crime and disease, loud and dirty, undermining a place increasingly conscious of its status (Leeds only became a city in 1893).
The narrow burgage plots were also, conveniently, the perfect setting for a type of building becoming something of a craze across Europe: the arcade.
First came Thornton’s Arcade, built on the site of the Old Talbot, one of Leeds’ oldest pubs. It was such a success that another shortly followed, Queen’s Arcade, named for Queen Victoria’s Golden Jubilee, and then the Grand Arcade.
The bulk of my research, though, focused on the most stunning concentration of Leeds’s arcades: the County Arcade and Cross Arcade.
To build them, the council compulsorily purchased properties on the east side of Briggate, and sold the land on to a private developer, the Leeds Estate Company, formed in 1897 for the purpose.
They were designed by Frank Matcham, best known as a theatre architect (he was behind the London Palladium and Hackney Empire among others). The theatricality shows.
Modelled on Milan’s Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II, the arcades run parallel to each other. The County Arcade is the larger and more ornate of the two, pink marble columns and mahogany shopfronts beneath dramatic glass domes lined with mosaics.
The distinctive terracotta designs through out are the work of Leeds-based pottery firm, Burmantofts. They remain, arguably, Leeds’ architectural centrepiece.
Originally, there was also a theatre at the development’s heart: the Empire Palace, seating as many as 1,700 people. It was demolished in the early ‘60s, eventually becoming the first Harvey Nichols outside of London.
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The transformation is perhaps best summed up by the 1909 brochure for Leeds Traders Show Week:
“No city in England can boast a more wonderful transformation than that witnessed at Leeds during the past two or three decades… Nearly the whole of the ramshackle property that skirted the east side of Briggate has been demolished, and on the sites have been erected a class of shop property that would do credit to any city in the country.”
To all intents and purposes, the project was a huge success. The press fawned over the new arcades, celebrated the blot of the slums and the Shambles removed from the city’s heart. Its been called the Knightsbridge of the North.
By the 1980s, these statements of civic ambition had themselves become dilapidated. Queen Victoria Street, the road that had always run between Matcham’s two arcades, had become a traffic-clogged wedge between his two masterpieces
It was pedestrianised, a huge glass artwork commissioned to span it – the largest secular work of stained glass in the world at the time of its 1990 completion – and the arcades renovated to their current glory.
The lives that were there before
I’ve mentioned a few times the slums that made up the area before Leeds’ arcades were developed.
In most accounts, they’ll get a mention – but the positive framing that made up contemporary accounts largely filters through to today. The remarkable ingenuity and creativity of those behind projects such as Leeds’ arcades lauded (and rightly so) as a source of local pride. Further analysis is rarely required.
But this is also a story of displacement.
It’s important not to simplify this – the streets coming off the Briggate were genuinely unsafe to live in. Dr Robert Baker, a Leeds based surgeon, identified a direct link between conditions in central Leeds and cholera outbreaks.
But they were also home to one of the densest areas of working-class housing in the city. This wasn’t just a ‘blot’ on the city, an area of ‘ramshackle property’. This was also a place where hundreds of people lived and got by the best they could.
When I decided to write about Leeds’ arcades, the question that interested me most related to this.
It’s summed up in a quote from author Chris Nickson’s the Leaden Heart, a crime novel set in Victorian Leeds, which he quotes in his blog exploring the city of 1899:
White Hart Yard had gone, knocked down by the hammers. Soon enough there’d be something new in its place. County Arcade, with more shops, and a way through from Vicar Lane… But Harper kept wondering what had happened to those people in Fidelity Court and the other tiny streets that didn’t exist any longer.
Where had they all gone?
A story of displacement and social sorting
I struggled to find much publicly available literature on this specific question (at least online). So I turned to the census records, tracing families street by street from the demolition footprint – including Fleet Street, Cheapside (later King Edward Street) and Wood Street (later Queen Victoria Street). I cross-referenced 1891 addresses against 1901 and 1911 returns, looking for what happened to the same households after they were displaced.
I’ll caution this: I’m not a historian, or a genealogist, and a couple handfuls of families is too small a sample to draw firm conclusions from. But what I found was genuinely striking.
The building of Leeds’ arcades are often described as slum clearances. But these were private developments, not municipal slum clearances.
In other words, there was no obligation to help displaced residents find a new home. The people on the footprint of the arcades in the 1890s simply had to find somewhere else, paying market rent.
The area around the Shambles, while described as notorious slums, were surprisingly mixed. What happened afterwards is akin to a sort of social sorting.
The upward-movers
There were more prosperous members of the community: I found James Butler, a tripe dealer who was able to take a genuinely upward step to a respectable Victorian area of Leeds, Little Woodhouse, as well as Adelaide Harrison, widowed during this period who appears to have been able to reinvent herself as a boarding house owner in nearby Harrogate.
Those who stayed close
Others, though, couldn’t afford to move far. There were shoemakers, brewer’s assistants and chandlers, and many of these households stayed within a few hundred yards.
For these households, the displacement meant finding the nearest available cheap rooms, often in parts of the city known for even worse slum conditions.
The immigrant families
The streets cleared for the Arcades were also home to a number of immigrant families, in particular Russian Jewish families – the Freedmans, the Finebergs and the Bernsteins.
In the years after the 1881 assassination of Tsar Alexander II, waves of anti-Jewish pogroms drove around 120,000 Jewish refugees from the Russian Empire to Britain.
Some came to Leeds and – like Max Freedman, who lived at Wood Street before its redevelopment – found tailoring work. Most of these families ended up in the Leylands, a densely packed Jewish quarter slightly further north.
The untraceable
There were also a number of residents of the area who simply disappeared from the record – such as one Patrick Durcan, an Irish tailor’s assistant, who I couldn’t trace. It’s impossible to know what happened to these people: whether they re-emigrated, moved within Britain off the record, or died unrecorded.
Ultimately, this was a densely packed, surprisingly mixed community. The arcade redevelopment process led them into a process of social sorting. The wealthy moved up. Immigrant families clustered in the Leylands. The majority were displaced into nearby slums. And a fourth group simply disappeared from the record.
And except for those few that were able to take an upward step, most of the families I traced ended up in areas that themselves became, within just a few decades, targets for demolition themselves. They found themselves in homes that would within a generation be demolished, too, in major slum clearance programmes.
This happened to the Leylands, too – though by then very few Jewish residents remained, as many of the community had thrived and moved on (eventually to Moortown and Alwoodley, centres of modern Leeds’ Jewish community, with a number of synagogues).
County and Cross Arcades in Leeds are undoubtedly among the country’s finest Victorian jewels.
They’re beautiful, and worth visiting on that basis alone. But the story of what came first – and after – is one of churn, displacement, and a working-class heritage often simply brushed under the carpet.
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