Pies and Prejudice

by Stuart Maconie

  The European Cup Final of 1975 was the comically perfect denouement of Leeds' seventies saga of begrudged victories and bitter, mocked failures. Bayern Munich won by two goals to nil after some of the worst refereeing decisions ever; a cast-iron penalty turned down, a perfectly good goal by Peter Lorimer disallowed. Drunk with pain like a wounded animal – but mainly just drunk – the Leeds travelling contingent rioted in the streets of Paris. The club was banned from European competition and the team slid into a long, slow decline. I was lured away by girls, music, girls, college and girls, in that order.

  So how nice to come back in happier times. The football team are rebuilding themselves – financial profligacy having nearly destroyed them again – and the city is abuzz. Of all the great northern civic rebirths of the last twenty years, Leeds has been the most talked about because it's been the most unexpected. From the vantage point of the deep, soft south, where it's always been synonymous with ferrets and watch-fobs and batter puddings and cloth caps, the idea of Leeds as a vibrant European city was first laughable then baffling. But get used to it, Giles and Sebastian. Deal with it, Henrietta and Imogen. Leeds is happening.

  It started happening in the mid-nineties. The hotel I'm staying in (42 The Calls) was an early part of it. Leeds' first boutique hotel, it began a city-wide trend for urban sophistication as well as the stolidly Victorian civic pride and wealth that had always made it a handsome city. Now it's handsome and sexy; a heady mix.

  The hotel takes its name from the Calls district, a former stopping-off point for the barges on the Aire and the canal. Twenty years ago, when this was derelict and deserted, a single woman would have been insane to have lingered alone in this part of town. Tonight I can see from my window a young woman giggling and chatting on her mobile phone as she sits on the steps of Cuban Heels salsa bar. Some local naysayers have already begun to describe the Calls area as 'yuppified', which is intended as an insult but I personally prefer it to 'run-down shithole'. There are apartments here if you can afford them and, for the price of a Cuba Libre or a plate of dim sum, you get the feeling of being in a cosmopolitan city. Look at the names: Hakuna Matata, Casa Mia, Sela, Dr Wu's. You could be in Milan, Tokyo or Seville, except the tans are from Tanfastic and there are a lot more tattoos.

  If you fancy a tattoo or some vulnerable part of your body pierced or maybe some outlandish item of surfer apparel, then you should stop off at the Cornmarket, a fine old circular building with great curved galleries, on your way from The Calls into the city centre. I would have thought opportunities for 'hanging ten' or 'riding the big curl' were fairly limited in Leeds, which may explain why the surfing shop was pretty quiet of a Thursday morning.

  The real market on Kirkgate was a lot busier. Leeds Market is one of those places that Alan Bennett really ought to eulogise more. It's a different kind of grandeur than the fabulous Victorian town hall or the art gallery – both favourites of the great man – but it has a magnificence all of its own, an Edwardian cathedral to commerce in green timber and high vaulted glass. Here for a century Leeds folk have come for bargains and for those items that you couldn't find anywhere else: parakeet cages, greaseproof paper, shaving-brush holders. A bit of sawdust on the floor à la Bury Market would have made it even more evocative. But like a lot of Leeds architecture, there's an endearing touch of the Hyacinth Bucket about the Market Hall, a certain raising of the nose towards the common herd. It was here in 1884 that Michael Marks first set up his stall with the slogan 'Don't Ask. Everything's A Penny', an early equivalent of Poundland, I suppose. Later, of course, in conjunction with Tom Spencer, they found that the way to Britain's heart was through underwear, microwaveable curries and those really great beef and onion crisps.

  As I cross the bustle of Kirkgate and Briggate, curving spines running through the eastern squares of the town, I notice that the lampposts are festooned with exhortations of municipal pride and cheering messages to the citizenry. In Pyongyang or Rangoon, these would say 'Shoulders To The Wheel Of Progress, Sons Of The Proletariat!' or 'Workers Of Our Glorious City, We Salute You For The Sacrifice Of Your Monthly Rice Allowance'. But this being modern Britain and the placards designed by a marketing consultant in an Armley loft space, they say 'Leeds Is Thinking Positive. Are You?' and 'It's Your City, Use It With Pride'. I shouldn't sneer. Pride was an awkward character that the Thatcher Experiment was supposed to eradicate from the north, along with hope, joy and security. Nice to see that it failed.

  Long before Thatcher was a malevolent twinkle in a Lincolnshire grocer's eye, Leeds was renowned for its superb arcades. Modern Leeds has continued this tradition in fine style, throwing a high stained-glass ceiling over Queen Victoria Street, or at least Brian Clarke Architects did. When the council announce that they're going to glass over some of the city's nicest, oldest shopping streets to make an instant arcade, you can understand the worry that the result could be some nasty hybrid of a tomato growers' polytunnel and a Center Parcs. I don't know what Alan Bennett thinks but Pevsner likes it and Maconie thought it singular and stylish, more like Brussels than Bladerunner. The shops were pretty classy affairs too. I almost bought a pair of leather brogues in one but on glancing at the price, I awoke to find a gaggle of concerned shoppers loosening my collar and offering me water. So I thought I'd leave it till next time. If you're determined to shop till you drop, The Light may sound spiritual and be next door to the Catholic cathedral but it's a temple to Mammon with a nightclub and a gym tucked inside.

  It was round about here that I decided to fasten on to the end of a crocodile of visiting academics who were slinking through the shallows of town. Their plastic name tags read like Peter Gabriel's 'Games Without Frontiers'; Sun Li and Sven, Pyotr and Giselle. A man with a clipboard and rimless specs addressed them in what seemed to be Dutch. They all laughed and then scuttled up a side street. I followed them right into the foyer of the City Varieties.

  The City Varieties Leeds is the oldest extant music hall in Britain. It's tucked discreetly away on Swan Street between two major shopping thoroughfares and next door to one of the many, many places in Leeds these days where you can get polenta, gnocchi or red snapper for lunch. I imagine when Houdini and Charlie Chaplin played here they popped into the Grapes for a pie and a pint. Many another legend of variety has played here and the most famous gaze down from murals on Swan Street. In the confined space of the extremely compact foyer, two of the Dutch contingent of academics start to have quite a tetchy dispute that I can't follow. Perhaps it was about who was the best out of Roy Hudd and Ken Dodd.

  The City Varieties looms large in my childhood and I guess that of many Brits between the ages of thirty and fifty for two reasons. Firstly it was the venue for the BBC's long-running show The Good Old Days, which ran from just after Agincourt to 1999. My nana loved this recreation of an evening at an Edwardian music hall with the same passion with which I hated it. As a toddler she would force me to watch it with her when she babysat me. Leonard Sachs, dad of Andrew, 'Fawlty Towers' Manuel, was the master of ceremonies and produced the most astonishingly prolix and grandiloquent introductions, full of terms like pulchritudinous and terpsichorean and coruscating and then, disappointingly, someone like Vince Hill would come on in a straw boater and sing an embarrassing song about dogs in the window. My nan loathed these verbose introductions, probably because they sounded to her puritanical Lancastrian ears suspiciously like showing off, a cardinal sin. They were the only bit of the programme I liked. Generally, I have always agreed with Alexei Sayle when he said that there were many competing theories as to why music hall died out – socio-economic, technological, etc. – but he thought it was because it was crap.

  The show has long since disappeared from our tellies but lives on in a live version still going at t'City Varieties. On the bill are Stan Stennett, Jimmy Cricket, Johnny Casson 'the furtive funster', Ward Allen and Roger the Dog, 'Two voices in one accord'. Marvellous stuff, I'll wager, but not for me. 'Why not come along in costume?' asks the flye
r. Why not drink a pint of caustic soda while you're at it, I think darkly.

  If you're a child of the seventies, the other reason to remember and fear the name City Varieties Leeds was Junior Showtime, which also came from the hallowed venue. Junior Showtime was a variety show for kids and ran for five years till 1974 – extraordinary really, given that kids hate variety. It was hosted by Bobby Bennett, a man with a shock of Jimmy Savile-esque blond hair, possibly compulsory in seventies Leeds, and boundless reserves of gusto. Pauline Quirke and Bonnie Langford were on it most weeks, I remember, shrieking and cracking awful jokes or appearing in mirthless 'skits'. I could take the Daleks but this I did have to watch from behind the sofa.

  The lunchtime tide of Leeds folk carries me down to City Square, a newly pedestrianised area being restored to how the Victorians would have known it before the car-mania of the sixties and seventies turned it into a polluted chicane. To the south is Leeds station, subject of an old indie ditty by the Parachute Men. To the west is Majestyk nightclub. To the north, far more glamorously, towers Number One, City Square. Here, in lofty air-conditioned splendour, tier upon tier of accountants and graphic designers, PR firms and new media companies climb up to the sky. It's more Manhattan than West Riding. Men in DKNY shades and women in fuck-me heels click through reception texting furiously, thumbs a blur as they go to get their three-bean and sweet potato wraps. It's all very sexy.

  Feeling positively troll-like by comparison, I remember I have reason to post an old-fashioned 'snail-mail' letter and so am pleased to see on one side of the square a broad and august building that looks very like a superior Victorian post office. And so it is: the Old Leeds Post Office. Things are moving so fast in Leeds though that it is a mistake to assume anything postal might occur there now. No, the post office is about to reopen as Residence 6, an £8 million redevelopment. While the building's classical facade has been maintained, inside it's become twenty-three luxury one- and two-bedroom apartments, each featuring kitchen, lounge and en suite bathrooms as well as state-of-the-art entertainment systems. Valet parking and gym naturally. It's hoped that 'as well as executives . . . Leeds United's new signings will stay at Residence 6 as they househunt while opposing players will be encouraged to use the apartments before a game.' It's all a far cry from Jack Charlton walking his greyhounds down to the pub, something I'm sure must have happened.

  Chris Dalzell, one of the project's grand frontages, has said, 'What we're putting in here is what most major cities don't have at the moment. We're a little bit ahead of the game. We wouldn't have done this if we didn't have the confidence in the city. It's raised the bar and what you'll find is that as we ratchet up what is provided, customer expectations will rise.' If the barman knows how to mix a martini as well as Chris can mix a metaphor, it'll be a great place to hang out.

  There'll be 'al fresco dining' in the square itself, something that will supposedly bring to the city 'a European feel', presumably Madrid rather than Chechnya. And you'll be able to enjoy your spinach and ricotta parcels under some handsome if incongruous statues including the Black Prince and discoverer of oxygen Joseph Priestley. As I stand there admiring them and reflecting on the wind of change that's sweeping the north, a man with a whippet on a lead walks past me. A fabulous moment.

  In the Henry Moore Centre, there are no pictures of whippets but there is an exhibition of Brazilian video installations. From here, you can stroll through a Perspex walkway to Leeds City Art Gallery, haunt of the teenage Alan Bennett and home to the finest collection of twentieth-century British art outside London. Their online literature encourages visitors to 'read ... mingle ... chat ... laugh'. Personally I'd have put 'look at some pictures' in there as well but I understand that museums are now so terrified of being thought elitist, so desperate to be 'inclusive', that they have to avoid the unspeakable truth, namely that modern art isn't for everyone. Neither is John Coltrane or Bartók or the ghost stories of Robert Aickman or peaty Laphroaig whisky or English mustard. That's why they're so special and fabulous. Let's not patronise the public by wet-nursing them like this. A lot of great art is tough and elitist. But we're grown-ups. We can take it. So go to this fabulous gallery and look at the Stanley Spencers and Antony Gormleys and Frank Auerbachs and then emerge onto the grand parade of The Headrow, Leeds most impressive street, with your mind refreshed and thinking great thoughts.

  Great thoughts of lunch in my case. The previous evening I'd dined at Bibi's, at the recommendation of the girls at 42 The Calls. They said it was the best Italian restaurant in Leeds and nothing that occurred or was placed in front of me made me doubt this in any way. It's a big, twilit, sumptuous, art deco room; the sort of place that Edward G. Robinson might have arranged a contract killing over a big plate of linguine. On a Sunday night it was absolutely packed with families, courting couples and bohemians. There's live entertainment here regularly on a proper stage but last night's entertainment was provided by a live DVD of soul/jazz smoothie George Benson on a huge screen. It was weird but kind of fun.

  Lunch was fishcakes and red onion and dolcelatte tart at Brasserie Forty 4 in The Calls. Like Bibi's it was completely full, this on a Monday lunchtime, and at the next table, a dissolute-looking couple chainsmoked and read the Guardian arts pages while ordering round after round of drinks: champagne, Baileys, cognac. It was a final nail in the coffin for any lingering stereotypes of Leeds and its people.

  Looking back, I seem to have written an awful lot about Bobby Bennett and red onion and dolcelatte tarts and hotels and shopping and not much about Leeds' great cultural heritage and its continuation. I've neglected completely to tell you about Leeds Town Hall, one of the great, and I'm using a technical architectural term here, 'fuck-off statements of northern Victorian might'. I love these kinds of landmark. On its massive stone steps, generations of Leeds citizens have met lovers and snogged or smoked or read their lunchtime novels while eating a banana sandwich. Looking up at these mighty colonnades and sheer braggadocio in stone you can only shake your head at the thought that George Bernard Shaw said Leeds ought to be burned down and John Betjeman said it was an ants' nest. Some nest. Some ants.

  In truth, when it comes to old Leeds, Alan Bennett's done it all before and far better than me in Telling Tales. I'd rather tell you about new Leeds, the Leeds of Corinne Bailey Rae, Forward Russia and the Kaiser Chiefs, the group whose brilliant 'I Predict A Riot', the north's new unofficial national anthem, paints an affectionately lurid picture of their home city and actually introduces the word Leodensian into a pop lyric. This is a town that seems almost drunk on its own newfound prosperity and vibrancy, and who, apart from jealous Londoners sweltering on the armpit line, could begrudge them?

  Let me paraphrase Freddie Trueman, archetypal Yorkshireman, and his sign-off on the riot of polyester and best bitter that was the pub sports show Indoor League: 'Ah'll sithee, Leeds.' Very soon I hope.

  Fur Coat and No Knickers

  Late one winter's afternoon in 2005, after finishing a day of location work for TV in west London, I flagged down a black cab in an avenue off the Portobello Road. I was on the opposite side of the road from the taxi and so nipped across the street only to find the driver's side rear door locked against me and the cabbie making a weary gesture that I should come round to the pavement side. As I was carrying a heavy bag and snow was falling, I was loath to walk any further than necessary but I complied.

  'How come I can't get in the other door?' I asked innocently.

  'Because, mate,' he said with a roll of his eyes, 'I don't let people in that way. A passing car could catch my door.'

  I pointed out that the street was deserted, that it was snowing and that I, the paying customer, was heavily burdened. But it didn't seem to matter.

  'Look, no offence, but this cab probably cost more than your house back home, wherever that is, so I ain't taking the chance, all right.'

  Snow or no snow, bag or no bag, I stepped briskly from the cab and went around to the cabbie's window. I s
aid that on reflection I'd decided to seek alternative travel arrangements as I was reluctant to contribute in any way to the income of a man whose attitude I found frankly objectionable. I added that I wouldn't be using his service again even under the unlikely scenario that he was Britain's sole surviving cabbie and that he was fortunate indeed that my displeasure with him had not taken some more direct, physical manifestation. That was the gist of my message anyway. Having watched the blood drain gratifyingly from his face, off I went into the sleet.