First and Last Loves

by John Betjeman

  But the original genius is Archibald Simpson. At the start of my visit my attention was held by a huge wall of granite, so bold, so simple in design, so colossal in its proportions that I stood puzzled. I have seen nothing like it before or since. Egyptian? Greek? Eighteenth century? Modern? No, it couldn’t be modern, for see the granite is weathered. This was the New Market built by Archibald Simpson in 1842. The magnificence of the entrance is designed to show the strength and quality of granite: the architect realised that there was no point in carving this unyielding material into delicate detail. Let the stone speak for itself and then emphasise its scale and texture by a few strong mouldings and broad pilasters projecting only an inch or two from the face of the building. The inside of this covered market is worthy of its outside—colossal, simple, constructional. I seemed to be stepping into one of those many-vistaed engravings by Piranesi. It was a great oblong hall with curved ends and all around a row of plain circular-headed arches rising to the glass and timber roof. Half-way down the wall height ran a gallery of shops. Shafts of sunlight slanted through the arches on to the wooden shops and stalls of the central space and the surrounding gallery. Archibald Simpson: here was an architect of genius, a Soane, a Hawksmoor, someone head and shoulders above the men of his time. Simpson’s work is almost always of the kind that depends on proportion for its ornament. His two-storey houses in crescents, Bon Accord and Marine Terraces for instance, are very plain but have all the subtlety in the glazing bars, now alas too often destroyed in favour of plate glass. But his greatest work is a brick tower and spire opposite the Art Gallery. The fact that it is in red brick makes it stand out, but not glaringly, among the grey granite of the rest of the city. It must have looked more wonderful still when the lead spires, for which Aberdeen was famous, were making further contrast. How can I explain why this tall plain spire is so marvellous that only Salisbury is in my opinion its rival? I think it is because of the way it grows out of the high, thin-buttressed tower below it, because of the pinnacles and tall gables at its base, because its very plainness is so carefully considered. It was designed in 1844 long before any architect had succeeded in ‘creating’ in the Gothic style on Gothic principles of construction—all other architects were only imitating at that time.

  When looking at the work of the present century no one can dismiss Marischal College, Aberdeen. Wedged behind the huge Town Hall, in an expensive and attractive mid-Victorian baronial style, I saw a cluster of silver-white pinnacles. I turned down a lane towards them, the front broadened out. Bigger than any cathedral, tower on tower, forests of pinnacles, a group of palatial buildings rivalled only by the Houses of Parliament at Westminster—the famous Marischal College. Imagine the Victoria tower with a spire on top, and all that well-grouped architecture below of lesser towers and lines of pinnacles executed in the hardest white Kemnay granite looking out over the grey-green North Sea, and you have some idea of the first impression this gigantic building creates. It rises on top of a simple Gothic one designed by Simpson in 1840. But all these spires and towers and pinnacles are the work of this century and were designed by Sir Alexander Marshall Mackenzie. You have to see them to believe them. True, they do not bear close inspection. The hollow central tower reveals a brick core within to support its spire. The inside seems small after all this outward magnificence—but as a piece of architectural showmanship, Marischal College is fine, an equivalent of Sir George Oatley’s soaring University Tower at Bristol.

  Aberdeen’s best modern building I have left to the last. It is the addition to St. Andrew’s Episcopal Cathedral by J. N. Comper, an Aberdonian who has already done much distinguished work in the city. You go in by a rather dingy entrance to a flat Perpendicular-style building designed by Simpson in 1816, when he was a man of twenty-six. You push open the door and your heart gives a leap—there, stretching away as in an old Dutch oil-painting, is Comper’s superb renovation of the interior. White arcades by Simpson, in a simple style with big mouldings, lead to a great double-aisled east end which Comper added in a style perfectly blending with the older building. White plaster vaulting diminishes away in perspective adorned with baroque gold and coloured shields. And there, far at the east end, is a great baldachin over the altar in burnished gold with a gold spire like that on King’s Chapel. And beyond the gold of the baldachin, intensely gold in this blazing whiteness, you see the deep blue tints, the green and the red of Comper’s large east window.

  I have only briefly sketched some of the glories of Aberdeen—there in those miles of Highland where the Dee comes falling from the conifer forests of John Smith’s castle at Balmoral. In the words of a little-known Victorian poet,

  Farewell Aberdeen ’twixt the Donside and Deeside

  How oft have I strayed through the long summer day

  On the fringe of the links o’er thy wide-spreading seaside

  To see the pink pebbles caressed by the spray.

  How gay as a student by King’s rugged steeple

  I loitered in archways and meadowpaths green

  To my Jacobite sympathies kind were the people

  Though deep in Balmoral dwelt Hanover’s Queen.

  From windows of dreamland I see thy grey granite

  All sparkling with diamonds after the rain,

  The Dee and the arch and suspensions that span it

  And fir-covered forests that rise from the plain.

  Down Union Street with majestical motion

  Electrical tramcars go painted in green,

  The ships to thy quaysides come in from the ocean

  I leave thee for ever, my loved Aberdeen.

  5

  LEEDS—A CITY OF CONTRASTS1

  BERNARD SHAW said something about Leeds—that it ought to be burned down, or words to that effect; expressed of course with more epigrammatic force and probably rather more kindly. And this is not surprising. Leeds is not a city for Mr. Shaw; it caters for communists and conservatives. An individualist would not understand it. So individualists have no right to criticise it. It is as though an art critic walking through a spinney were to object to the contours of a mound made by wood ants. The person to examine the heap should be the entomologist: the person who ought to examine Leeds should be the town planner. An æsthetic appreciation of Leeds is of little value, because Leeds has little use for æsthetics. For this reason the Civic Hall at Leeds must be regarded only as a symbol of the Civic Pride of the Conservative party in that city.

  By likening Leeds to an ants’ nest, I do not mean to decry the city or its inhabitants, but rather to show that Bernard Shaw went no deeper than an art critic.

  To understand Leeds, to understand its Civic Hall and the regrettable Headrow, one must acquire a Leeds sense of proportion. And this is done by realising two things about Leeds. First, it is a Victorian city. Secondly, it is parochial. These two qualities are far more blessed than is generally supposed. Today, when cosmopolitanism is still the rage, parochialism, and all that goes with it, is unpopular. Leeds does not attract tourists. There is not even a guide-book to the city. Life in Leeds must be unbearable for the Londoner.

  Leeds is a Victorian city. Once the train passes Grantham the character of England changes; you enter a foreign country. Disused branch lines, now only sidings, are full of empty trucks labelled L.N.W.R., G. & S.W., N.B., G.N.R., M.R., memorials of happy days before the railways amalgamated. Even the large, gas-lit stations with their smoking-rooms, buffets, first-class, second-class and general waiting rooms, whose green sunless walls once sheltered varying degrees of commercial prosperity, are still plastered with notices belonging to the old railway companies. And when, here and there, some modernistic poster has been introduced on to black platform or into high secluded refreshment room, it is as though a woman with make-up had entered with harsh giggles and puffed cigarette smoke into that ordered Victorian life.

  And outside the stations, from the high embankments the country spreads out like a map. Large mills, with square panes broken, stand
up among strips of houses stretched around them, “TO LET,” “THIS CONVENIENT FACTORY FOR SALE”; the owners of the old-established firms have gone bust or sold out and retired to simple cottages in the south, their large Italianate mansions in Wood-house, Headingly and Allerton, once silent, wealthy suburbs, pulled down and the gardens chopped up into building estates. Meanwhile, the workmen have remained, living in rows of back-to-back houses around the factories and the mills because they cannot afford to live elsewhere, and hoping that some rich man will come and open again that gaunt and empty building which once brought them and their families a livelihood. And between the industrial communities, scattered in the southern suburbs between Wakefield and Leeds, are a few smoke-blackened farms, with paper-strewn pasturage, whose fences are gapped and footpaths well-trodden by the feet of the unemployed. And somehow in Leeds itself the rain seems always to be falling, gathered on the northern hills around the moors—the moors which not even streets and mills can shut out, reminders to the citizens of a hungry freedom beyond.

  You leave the Great Northern Station and turn to the right down Wellington Street, and in no time you are in the City Square. It is just such a City Square as you would imagine Leeds would have. Alfred Dairy’s lamp standards, nudes representing Night and Morning, hold arc lamps, now fitted with drawn-wire bulbs. But nudity still shocks many of the inhabitants. The General Post Office, a large and vulgar affair; the Queen’s Hotel, the Ritz of Leeds, with decorations by J. F. Bentley later to be architect of Westminster Cathedral; and some offices in Portland stone reminiscent of Oxford Street, flank all sides of the square save one, where still stands the Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel—the same chapel in which Priestley preached—an eighteen-forty reminder in black Protestant northern Gothic of the Nonconformist conscience which has made Leeds what it is. And, almost hidden, are the impressive, simple entrance piers to Wellington Station. Trams, trains and tricycle bells and gear changing—if these are the times, then Leeds moves with them.

  Yet, what were the times of Leeds? If you walk a short distance from the City Square you will come to Park Square, a delightful eighteenth-century group with Brodrick’s fine Town Hall (1858) rising up behind it, black above the pink brick of the earlier houses. And down by the brown waters of the Aire and Calder Canal you will still see only nineteenth-century mills and warehouses, whose undiversified and solid exteriors are the cathedrals of the industrial north. Beside them, the black, locked Protestant churches with their commodious galleries, Church of England baize and marble monuments to departed manufacturers, seem less like places of worship. “I can’t recollect the time when I did not go to the factory. My father used to drag me there when I was quite a little fellow, in order to wind reels for him.”2 Life centred round the factory all right, and God spake out from the pages of the Old Testament. At the end of the eighteenth century the factories were placed at the east end of the town and the west end was residential. Park Square, Hanover Square, Bedford Place and Queen Square became engulfed in the westward spread.

  Let me first consider the nineteenth-century development of Leeds architecturally, for the social aspect must come under the heading of parochialism. On airy Richmond Hill, at the east of the town, houses were built close up against the factories for the workers: rows of two-storeyed houses built back-to-back with no gardens at all and only the cobbled street and the houses opposite to look at. Several families lived in each two-roomed house. Go to the bottom of Nippet Lane and see what the old speculators did. A man named Weller bought a small bit of ground. On it he crammed as many houses as possible, running in straight lines off the main street; Weller Avenue, Weller Grove, Weller Mount, Weller Place, Weller Terrace, Weller Road, Weller View. Sometimes, with touching parental affection, he would bring his children in—Nellie Grove, Back Nellie Grove, Archie Street, Archie Place, Doris Crescent, Back Doris Crescent, or use long words—Stipendiary Street, Industrial Street, Back Cemetery Lane. But the houses would be much the same, just as crowded, only a little more or a little less pretentious, according to their dates, and always among them, like the house of God, black mills and blacker chapels and churches.

  So much for the industrial dwellings. The main streets are different. The Kirkgate and the Briggate, once plain shopping districts intersected by shambles, not unlike the streets of Cork or Limerick today, cast off their Georgian glory and assumed the Jacobean, the Romanesque, the Holbeinesque, the Early English, the Perpendicular and the neo-Georgian, in Leeds phorpres brick and stone and terra-cotta. If you wait, sheep-like, in the long queue for the Roundhay tram, you will see more of this, the other side of the picture. Grass appears, the houses spread out, they are higher, they are detached, some have turrets, some have towers, and the larger, finer ones have become municipal property. There was a time when Mr. Peter Fairbairn’s house “Woodsley” was the most lavishly decorated in England. At that time Queen Victoria stayed in it to open Brodrick’s Town Hall. The Illustrated London News shows her admiring a pair of vases, a bust and a portrait in the presence of the owner (later Sir Peter Fairbairn), who was Lord Mayor of Leeds. Those were the days! Melon à la Coburg, Saumon-Balmoral, Bœuf Victoria, Fraises (out of season) Albert Prince Consort, Champagne, Lemonade, Selzer, Claret, Burgundy, Punch. Sitting on a packing case in McConnel’s wine shop you can still imagine it all, while old men who once sent sherry to the grand merchants’ houses hand out double scotches to commercials.

  It was in these great days of Leeds that Cuthbert Brodrick was given his opportunity. He built the Town Hall (by far the finest building in the city), the Corn Exchange, the Leeds Institute, the King Street Warehouses, and several private houses. It is unlikely that one whose tastes were for the monumental would have concerned himself with houses, but what Brodrick did accomplish is the best monument a Victorian industrial city can be expected to have, a sequence of noble public buildings in the grand classical manner, before it died down into contemporary blatancy of “naicenesses.”

  And now for Leeds parochialism. It is a long story based on temperament and surroundings. To take surroundings first. Leeds has a population of a little over 500,000. It is not a very over-crowded city, it is merely appallingly badly housed. On the deaths from tuberculosis, the infant mortality, and the results of compulsory constipation it is needless to expatiate. The City Council, however, is not without resourcefulness. Under the 1930 Act it decided on a five-year programme; 2,000 of the back-to-back houses were to be demolished in that time and an adequate number of houses erected to replace them. In the first two years of the plan twenty-five were demolished and 942 new ones built. At best it will take 190 years to clear the city of back-to-backs.

  The crowded conditions in what Queen Victoria called “this great city” naturally make its poorer inhabitants aware of one another’s lives. You have to know your neighbour opposite on the first floor when you want to string a clothes line across the street to dry your own washing. Each house has its doorsteps yellowed on the edges: thousands of people are content to wait in queues. Leeds is indeed an ants’ nest. And when the King and Queen came in August, 1933, to open the new Civic Hall (quite forty houses must have been demolished to clear the site), some of the saddest, dingiest little lanes had their decorations and hardly an exhausted Wolf Cub or irritated infant was without its red, white and blue favour or Union Jack. I was wandering about in the little lanes of the Richmond Hill Ward (average 2.17 persons per room) as the guns went off which announced the Royal entrance to the city. The courts and alleys where I stood were deserted. Everyone had gone to see the King and Queen. Suddenly bells pealed out under the clouds and even louder than the bells came the cheering. When I approached as near to the centre as I could through the crowds, the sun came out and down the steps of the Town Hall came the Queen in white. The cheers were deafening, hats and flags were waved. The city was alight with excitement. And then when the rain fell in the evening, after the Royal visitors had driven away, back went the crowds to their back-to-backs, “Long Live the
King, God Bless our King and Queen.” “It is my earnest hope and prayer that today’s ceremony may prove the beginning of increased prosperity for this great city.” That should be proof enough of Leeds loyalty. And like a loyal parish Leeds did not expose its blemishes that day. It smiled through its illness. I think a city which has such remarkable people should take better care of them.

  The remarkable people are only one side of the picture. There is the University closely identified, unlike Oxford and Cambridge, with the city which gave it birth. Here the intellectual life of the north, which produced most engineers, philosophers and poets of nineteenth-century England, finds inadequate embodiment, though the new Parkinson building designed by T. A. Lodge will greatly increase the accommodation. There is also the other fifth of the population which rules the four-fifths. They are Yorkshire people too, and just as loyal and still parochial. If you go out to dinner with one of them up in Roundhay—“dinner is served between 5.30 and 7.30” throughout the town—you will get an insight into their lives. A comfortable semi-detached residence in the Tudor style will welcome you, for the days of detached mansions in their own grounds have passed. And there will be a look round the garden and the wireless after dinner, and talk about Leeds this and Leeds that: the Town Hall is the third longest in the world, the cloth output is the largest in the world, the Civic Hall is the most beautiful Civic Hall in the world.

  And from this talk there naturally arises the question of new buildings. The best architects must be got for the best city. So Sir Reginald Blomfield, from London, designed the Headrow, a bold street cut with fine imagination and foresight right from the Town Hall to St. Peter’s Street. The Headrow consists of shops with offices above them. The buildings are constructed of steel and subsequently ornamented with brick and Portland stone, the parapets being diversified by urns. The incline of the Headrow from Victoria Square to the Briggate is rather severe. Here the effect of the stepped roof lines is unpleasing, and there can be no denying that Sir Reginald’s architectural decoration does not look at home in homely Leeds. I found on enquiry that the Headrow was not popular. One can only wonder why the architect did not follow the early nineteenth-century industrial tradition of Leeds, of which there are plenty of examples in side streets and in old engravings and photographs, with Trinity Church as a good example of the use of local material.