SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

Spotted this in the Independent. £40 for the book..http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-enter ... 01461.html

Worth a look at the 12 sample photos    

Looks amazing - there aren't many of these good colour photos about that show that it really was a colour world and not black and white like in most photos!Shame it's £40..

It was colour after a fashion. Seems to me that everything back then in the early '70's was of a fairly dark hue - mostly shades of brown peeling paint, and dark grey rusty fences and fall pipes. Much of Leeds at the time was just waiting to fall over due to appalling maintenance - everything seemed to need repointing.The few things that were not brown, were soot black.I guess no-one was gong to spend money looking after a building that was clearly going to be pulled down, its kind of interesting that many of the survivors had been scheduled to be demolished but somehow it was never done, and now cleaned up and restored they are some of Leeds best structure, and that include all those houses that were supposed to be slums. Turns out the real slums were the ones often built in the place of the demolished streets.

Author Peter Mitchell.Same guy who did Momento Morion Quarry Hill Flat some several years ago ?

These sample photos look terrific and I'm sure the book is fascinating, but I think that if you look hard enough then there will always be some parts of Leeds that give the impression that it is in decline. There was a lot of planning blight in Leeds in the early 1970s, but this was often due to the fact that it was in a phase of aggressive modernisation at the time. Leeds was marketing itself as 'motorway city of the 70s', many iconic buildings (for the time) were erected in the city centre, new housing developments were conspicuous throughout the city, and to many Leeds was reinventing itself as a modern city that had no reason to mourn the industrial history that was passing.I think this project was short-sighted and hubristic, but it does show that our view of history is often skewed by the passing of the years and the construction of new images. Leeds in the 2000s was held up as the 'Knightsbridge of the North', but I'm sure almost everyone in the city could have pointed to areas that had deteriorated significantly since the 1970s.

Igor Belanov wrote: Leeds in the 2000s was held up as the 'Knightsbridge of the North', but I'm sure almost everyone in the city could have pointed to areas that had deteriorated significantly since the 1970s. That would be Civic Hall serving up magic mushrooms for breakfast again.Those councillors are a funny lot, they often see amazing things the citizens of Leeds can't     

Also on the Daily Mail websitehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-236573 ... -City.html

dogduke wrote: Author Peter Mitchell.Same guy who did Momento Morion Quarry Hill Flat some several years ago ? That is a book worth having if you can get hold of a copy - not seen one for ages. Like hens teeth.

RichT wrote: Also on the Daily Mail websitehttp://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-236573 ... -City.html Hang on a minute, one of the pics on here is a little odd. The Racing Pigeon Shop. These pics are all supposed to have been taken in the 1970's, so how come the telephone number on the shop has a 2 before it? Strange. Leeds changed from 0532 to 0113 on April 16th 1995 which was the same time that the 2 was added to the original 6 digit number...