December 1989 - The grandeur that was Leeds

As the trans-Pennine train pulls into Leeds City Station it passes a large advertising hoarding on the left, featuring a monacled-huntsman holding a glass of Tetley bitter. On the right, Giotto's tower stands proudly alongside the railway arches. The one, a Yorkshire icon, the other a monument to industrial grandeur, are symbolic of a city of contradictions that has made a successful marriage of Yorkshire values and entrepreneurship.

In a county with so many differing characteristics, Leeds has perhaps the hardest image of all. Here the bluff Yorkshireman uses bluff and counter bluff. The swift march to the pub door among a group of Loiners - Loiners are to Leeds what Scousers are to Liverpool - contrasts vividly with the hesitancy to approach the bar and reach into the rarely plumbed depths of the trouser pocket to buy a round.

This carefulness, however, is regarded as a virtue in a city which demands value for money. When the aldermen of Leeds, bursting with civic pride, demanded the biggest and best town hall, last century, they blanched at the idea of paying more for a tower in the architect's plans.

They asked him to make it an optional extra just in case they decided they couldn't thoil it after all. Thoil, incidentally, is a word it is necessary to appreciate to understand the Leeds psyche. A dialect derivation of the Norse word, thole, to endure or to suffer, its widest meaning in Yorkshire is to justify an expense. It is one thing to afford something; it is another thing to thoil it.

In a rare expression of extravagance, the council opted after much deliberation to go over-budget and have the tower. The result was one of the finest civic buildings in the land which dominates the city's Headrow.

Architectural excess was a hallmark of the city fathers who had a tendency to invest their newfound riches from the woollen industry in Italianate structures such as the reconstruction of Giotto's capanile at the Duomo in Florence.

The scaled-down replica was built as a dust extraction unit at Colonel Thomas Harding's Tower works which used to make steel pins for wool combing engines. A second chimney alongside is modelled on the campanile of the Palazzo del Signoria in Sienna or the Lamberti Tower in Verona, depending on which book you read.

The new renaissance of 19th century Leeds did not stop at Italy, however. A hundred yards from Tower Works is Marshall's Temple Mills which would look more in place on the banks of the Nile at Luxor.

Huge blocks of millstone grit were used to construct this factory, covering two acres, in the style of ancient Egypt. While Ignatius Bonomi, the architect, took great pains to model it on the Temple of Horus at Edfu he had to carefully insulate the roof to ensure the correct humidity inside for flax spinning.

A layer of plaster was covered in pitch. Earth was shovelled on top to prevent the pitch cracking and grass was seeded to bind the earth together. Sheep were then grazed on the roof to keep the grass down.

This combination of practicality with innovation, coupled with a desire to make money and keep it, has long characterised this largest of the Yorkshire cities.

Unlike most of its neighbours it quickly diversified its industrial base, branching out into machinery manufacturing and engineering. One of its successes has been in the manufacture of industrial locomotives which goes back to the earliest days of steam power.

Matthew Murray, one of the great engineering pioneers, developed the first practical steam railway which ran from Leeds to Middleton, using a rack and pinion system. Instead of pressing on with passenger train development and its accompanying kudos, typical of the Leeds entrepreneur he decided there was more money in industrial machinery.

The industrious nature of the Leeds workforce was given an enormous boost in the 1880s with an influx of about 15,000 Jewish refugees escaping the pogroms in Eastern Europe. The exodus was heading for Liverpool after setting down in Hull, but many never went beyond Leeds where they found a growing clothing industry crying out for labour.

Many went to work for Sir John Barran whose Moorish-style mill, St Paul's House in Park Square, remains one of the city's architectural delights. Barran was the man who asked a company of band-saw manufacturers to develop the band knife so he could cut several pieces of cloth at once.

He also developed the single-line clutch to allow sowing machinists to vary their machine speeds working from a single drive shaft.

Barran revolutionised tailoring into a mass production industry exploited later by Sir Montague Burton, Joseph Hepworth and Michael Marks, whose penny bazaar on Leeds market was the forerunner of Marks & Spencer.

The Jewish population, with some exceptions, has tended to maintain a reserve and detachment from mainstream city life which belies the strength and vigour it has imbued in the Leeds character. Leeds people perhaps have more in common with New Yorkers than with their near neighbours in Bradford and Wakefield.

While Yorkshire humour is certainly not lost to this city - they still maintain that sparrows in Pudsey fly backwards to keep the soot out of their eyes - the reality of modern Leeds is a thriving metropolis where the cloth cap image has become subordinate to pinstripe pretentions.

Leeds has never quite shaken-off a certain meanness of spirit, an arrogance which was once apparent in its football team and which is still visible in the hierarchy of Yorkshire cricket. Leeds Art Gallery is a fine building with a superb collection of Henry Moore sculptures, but it is somewhat lacking in the number and quality of philanthropic donations to be found in other regional galleries.

Benjamin Gott, for example, who built his mill upwind of the city in 1824 and drove out the wealthier residents with the smoke from his chimneys, amassed works by Titian, Rubens, Caravaggio, Poussin, Canaletto and Breughel at his Armley manor house. Where are they now?

Gott's Bean Ing Mills heralded a grimy industrial epoch for Leeds which led to a common belief for generations that all stone was black. The smoke had its advantages. It helped to screen the city from German bombers during the second world war according to Mr Peter Brears, director of the City Museums. He recalls hearing one of the locals watching the cleaning of the town hall a few years back ask: 'Why are they painting it cream?'

Removing the grime has revealed a collection of some of Britain's finest Victorian and Edwardian gems in what is already proving to be another renaissance for Leeds. There is an over-quoted Yorkshire expression which says: 'Where there's muck, there's brass.' A better motto for Leeds Loiners would be: 'where there's brass, there's more brass.'

See also: Workplace design

© Financial Times, 1989