SecretLeeds - History, culture and architecture in Leeds

The latest series of this interesting program started this week and this time concerns a house in Headingly. Repeat on Saturday and is on iplayer.

Fascinating series. Even more interesting when you know, or in my case used to know, Leeds and can identify places and buildings in many of the scenes of the city.
SPOILER ALERT ( if you haven't seen it yet)
I had never heard of the huge fire in the Dark Arches in 1892 which destroyed the station above and the bridge which cut off industrial Leeds from its suppliers and customers as well as knocking out passenger traffic.
Victorian railway stations were sometimes designed with goods depots at basement level ( Central Station in Manchester being one example). When you consider the types of material stored there , tallow , fats , wool etc, fire was an accident waiting to happen which would take out the only modern transport link in the city apart from canals.

There was a thread that mentions the fire way back when the site first started, including a decent picture.

viewtopic.php?t=624

Here is some info and pics from Leodis:-

January 1892 Leeds New Station was built in 1869. It was situated off New Station Street, roughly occupying the area where platforms 9 to 17 of the present Leeds Station are situated. At the time New Station was built, the Dark Arches were created to carry the train tracks over the canal. The gaps beneath the arches were rented out by the railway companies as storage areas. One of these areas was used by Watson and Sons, soap manufacturers. In the early hours of the morning on 13th January 1892, a fire broke out in Watson's warehouse, igniting around 1,700 tons of highly flammable resin, tallow and oil, the raw materials of soap. The ferocity of the fire caused the supports holding up part of the station to give way. As this view shows, a significant amount of track and most of platforms 1, 2 and 3 collapsed. In the centre of the view are a number of burnt out waggons. These were attached to a long line of carriages when they caught on fire. The burning wagons were cut loose and shunted into the hole in a bid to halt the progress of the flames.

Clearly the stone arches survived very well. What collapsed were the iron girders carrying the tracks across the canal branch and its three-gated lock. The main station structure looks to be in the distance unaffected. The platform ramps appear to be just clear of the void, so it was the entire width of trackwork and its supporting bridges entering the West end of the station that was destroyed, not the station itself.

There's a section where the walls look very different. You can see it from the canal on Google Streetview: https://goo.gl/maps/yUpVw8wkyJ323cTA9. That's where the fire was.

mhoulden, not so. The brick wall shown in your picture is where there was once an engine shed and turntable above with workshops etc beneath. The fire was where the canal branch through to the river was situated beyond the modern round tower building seen in the background. The broad canal arm there was the entrance to the canal and the bricked up massive girder in the station wall opposite the current end of it is where the then surviving girder shown in the 19C photos was.

This is where the fire took place, you can quite clearly see the new brick work

https://www.google.co.uk/maps/@53.79310 ... 4352?hl=en

Thanks buffaloskinner, that's the bunny - I still haven't learnt how to post pictures!

Jim. Remember you almost lost your glasses at the other end of the tunnel