Peter Mitchell - Memento Mori

MEMENTO MORI THE FLATS AT QUARRY HILL, LEEDS

With a newly added

Afterword

2 .3

Description of Photograph: Quarry Hill Junction Of New York Rd & Regent St. Taken

by Crittal Manuf. Co. (No Neg) Negative Number: 497/P87 Album Number: 9 Date When Taken: ?

At the time of their construction these flats were photographed slab by slab, block by block, day by day. This industry was kept in a set of albums, the last entry of which was dated July 1951. A record of technical achievement, political progress and civic pride that is no more. Today, flotsam from that unique archive lies beached on distant shelves. Time Marches On!

MEMENTO MORI T H E F L AT S AT Q U A R R Y H I L L , L E E D S

Peter Mitchell

4 .5

This edition published by RRB Publishing, Bristol 2016 www.rrbpublishing.com

Book first published in 1990

by Smith Settle Ltd, Yorkshire © Peter Mitchell 1990, 2016 Preface © Bernard Crick 1990 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the publishers.

ISBN Paper 978-0-9932323-3-6 Design: Peter Mitchell Facsimile re-construction: Alan Rutherford www.handoverfistpress.com Typeface: Gill Sans Printed and bound in UK by JamJar Print, Bristol www.jamjarprint.co.uk

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds. Refuse Disposal Block. Back Elevation 1939

MEMENTO MORI THE FLATS AT QUARRY HILL, LEEDS

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds. Largest in europe. 155 To a Mouse ON TURNING HER UP IN HER NEST, WITH THE PLOUGH, NOVEMBER 1785 Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim’rous beastie, O, what a panic’s in thy breastie!

Thou need na start awa sae hasty, Wi’ bickering brattle!

I wad be laith to rin an’ chase thee, Wi’ murd’ring pattle!

I’m truly sorry Man’s dominion Has broken Nature’s social union, An’ justifies that ill opinion, Which makes thee startle, At me, thy poor, earth-born companion, An’ fellow-mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve; What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!

A daimen icker in a thrave ’S a sma’request.

I’ll get a blessin wi’ the lave, An’ never miss’t!

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!

Its silly wa’s the win’s are strewin!

An’ naething, now, to big a new ane, O’foggage green!

An’ bleak December’s winds ensuin, Baith snell an’ keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an’ waste, An’ weary winter comin fast, An’ cozie here, beneath the blast, Thou thought to dwell, Till crash! the cruel coulter past Out thro’ thy cell.

That wee-bit heap o’ leaves an’ stibble Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!

Now thou’s turn’d out, for a’ thy trouble, But house or hald, To thole the Winter’s sleety dribble, An’ cranreuch cauld!

But, Mousie, thou art no thy lane, In proving foresight may be vain: The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley, An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain, For promis’d joy!

Still thou art blest, compar’d wi’ me!

The present only toucheth thee: But, Och! I backward cast my e’e On prospects drear!

An’ forward, tho’ I canna see, I guess an’ fear!

Robert Burns

6 .7

Preface Bernard Crick I was in Sheffield just about the time when the great tower blocks were still going up, and was often across in Leeds, but I missed seeing the demolition of the Quarry Hill Flats which caught the imagination of my friend Peter Mitchell. He could have taken me on some strange jaunts and urban walks had I known him then. We share an odd taste for the back streets of the old Northern cities and for the crumbling relics of noble hopes for the betterment of others. In a broadcast about Sheffield I once remarked how many bus-loads of Swedish architects were brought to see the Parkhill Estate in the 1960s, “the largest housing block in Europe, I hope”. That too caused endless difficulties and is now in partial decay.

Nobody welcomes decay, on the contrary; but contemplating such sights sets off a strange slow-burning mixture of nostalgia and hope for a better future. These are somewhat conflicting emotions, but if one is honest, it is useless to deny that many of us live with them both. l suppose that is part of what first fascinated me about Orwell and led me to write his life. Peter Mitchell provides a kind of visual equivalent to Orwell’s synthesis of nostalgia and socialism; and not just visual. Peter’s contemporary diary as spectator of the Great Demolition is very moving: vivid, contemplative and reflective.

Though the photographs can stand on their own, authentic and telling, yet the whole of picture and text together is a good deal greater than the sum of the two parts. l have another obsessive friend who works endlessly on an anthology of Human Folly by categories. There is an awful lot to choose from. Follies always mean well, even if often the essence of folly lies in a thumping great disproportion of means to ends. But unless his publisher allows him lots of photographs and drawings, he will have to miss follies of architecture, still less follies of town planning which would need masses of diagrams, yellowed blueprints and historical explanation. But Peter Mitchell is not denouncing Quarry Hill as a folly. What is so interesting about this book is that it catches the pathos, almost tragedy, of a failed or crumbled utopian vision.

So here is no easy polemic against utopianism or modernism in architecture and planning, even though Quarry Hill failed: it is only, if polemic at all, a polemic against utopias that fail. At the time those flats were being built, with revolutionary construction methods, l was a small boy sleeping under a home-made poker-work motto, ‘If at first you don’t succeed, Try, Try Again.’ And in my brother’s room was ‘Remember, Failure is Often a Stepping-Stone to Success’ – not so in his case, nor in the subsequent planning history of Leeds either. I slept in the small just-enough-room-for-a-bed room in a typical South London lower-middle class lewder, cruder pseudo-Tudor doll’s box by-pass house. At the same time, I now realise, hundreds of working class lads of my own age were being uplifted into the heavens, though not as high as post-war, as part of a noble experiment. Truth to tell l was living in the kind of semi-detached with its own garden that the parents of the Leeds’ lads would have chosen, if anyone at the time had dreamt of asking them or giving

them any choice. The pre-war council house was, of course, just such housing – and on the whole much better built than its lower-middle class equivalent; and yet it was no answer at all to the problem of rebuilding and revitalising the inner city, and to the hope to create, or preserve, genuine communities.

‘Where there is no vision, the people perish’, says the Book of Proverbs – which is a better saying for humanity than the Prince of Wales’ wails against all modernism with the instinctive insipid good taste of our very own top people. Quarry Hill was a passionately visionary project. And it is an interesting human tale of what can be done by individual will, if the social and political conditions are right. ln the 1920s Leeds was nationally notorious for bad housing, even among Tory ministers, and for a council that dragged its feet against anything but minimal doing-up of the insanitary, over-crowded and rapidly decaying back-to-backs. Into that scene there came a political evangelist whose name was the Rev. Charles Jenkinson, appointed Vicar of Holbeck in 1927 and elected to the council for Labour in 1930. Before coming to Leeds he had been a friend and disciple of ‘the Red Vicar’, Conrad Noel, that same Vicar of Thaxted who had founded the Church Socialist League and had run the red flag up his steeple in 1917. He was not merely dedicated and passionate like Conrad Noel, but he mastered statistics and the technicalities of housing law and practice as if a born-again Sidney Webb. Largely through his efforts Labour produced a minority report on slum clearance that caused an administrative and political sensation, and was probably responsible for Labour gaining control of the council in 1933. They soon lost control, many of the slum dwellers being reluctant to move and angry at compulsion (a portent of post-war problems either not read at the time, or forgotten). But a programme for 30,000 new houses had been launched, including the Quarry Hill Flats.

As Alison Ravetz reminds us in her excellent and most thoughtful study, Model Estate (Croom Helm, 1974), ‘while by the 1960s flats were accepted as an inevitable part of the urban scene, this was not the case in the 1930s … many towns had little or no direct experience of them and people still tended to identify them with special categories of household, such as the single or the elderly, and with the Victorian image of tenements for the poor.’ There was passionate controversy about building flats at all, rather than low density council houses. Some called him ‘Red Ruin’ and others, according to a local reporter, ‘Good old Jenky, t’ best booger i’ Leeds.’ Conservatives and Rate-Payer candidates opposed flats in fear of having to spend money, but also advocates of the Garden City movement opposed them on aesthetic and health grounds (we would now say ‘environmental’). So almost from the beginning the advocates of flats had to make clear that they did not mean ‘tenements’, they meant ‘modern flats’ to a high standard, like the smart ‘luxury flats’ going up in the private sector, all along Maida Vale, Finchley Road and the Hendon Way in London – made nationally famous in Picture Post and the Daily

8 .9 Karl Marx Hof, Vienna, 1931

Express. (English councils seemed unaware that perhaps the majority of the inhabitants of Glasgow and Edinburgh, in all social classes, had been living happily in flats for a very long time.)

Labour made a man of thirty-five director of housing, R.A.H. Livett, who had been housing deputy at Manchester. He was an advocate of the modern movement in architecture and knew the latest ideas on engineering and construction. Ferro-concrete was to the 1930s almost what nuclear power was to the 1960s: the portentous promise of economy, strength and cleanliness combined. Jenkinson and Livett resolved to make the Quarry Hill area a single bold new scheme, not just model housing but model urban planning. The people would not have to be permanently removed and rehoused, they could be brought back again into new houses. (Most, in fact, got lost en route or stayed in the houses to which they were temporarily decanted.) There was no English model, so Jenkinson and Livett, to the rage of the ratepayers, toured new developments of workers’ flats in France and finally came to Vienna: the famous Karl Marx Hof itself.

The Social Democrats had created a new kind of housing estate, monumental flats, five or six storeys high, sometimes with facades half a mile in length, and with formal courtyards and gardens, communal laundries, kindergartens, playgrounds and community centres (in fact, meeting halls). This was the model for Quarry Hill, although by English standards the individual Viennese flats were substandard: small, badly finished and without lifts.

All could be improved upon, and was; and on the massive scale of 938 flats in the total design.

‘The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men Gang aft a-gley.’ Historians of the nineteenth century North American utopian communities discovered that these noble colonies usually collapsed through petty reasons – small selfishnesses, personal rivalries (as well as the fact that many of the colonists were unused to manual work). Small things, not any inherent fault in the grand design, destroyed Quarry Hill. The lifts worked well, unlike some of their skimped successors of the sixties and seventies; but the great innovation of the Garchey automatic waste disposal system, well designed in France but not tested over time, gradually gummed up, proving horrendously costly and difficult to clean. But above all the revolutionary ‘Mopin system’ of prefabricated blocks of stressed steel and concrete either proved inherently defective, or poor welding led to a seepage of water and rust that weakened the whole structure. By the early 1960s, the brave new structure needed repairs more costly than complete new building. So the demolition followed.

Theres no real moral. lt is all just rather sad. All buildings die in the end, that’s why Peter Mitchell has reflectively called this haunting book Memento Mori. And it is not clear whether even as a model it failed. Due to the war, many of the communal facilities were never finished. After Young and Willmot’s Bethnal Green studies of the 1960s everyone went on about destroying communities in rehousing the old back streets. Rehabilitation

came to be fashionable and did respond to what ordinary people said they wanted; but they said that at a time when the worst of the old back-to-backs had gone. And it is quite enigmatic how much ‘decent housing’ weighed against ‘community’ among the actual inhabitants of Quarry Hill (no one asked them at the time). There is some indication that they were, on the whole, reasonably happy with their new homes, even if some were mildly disappointed or irritated that the council paid little attention to any ideas for improvement put forward by successive tenants’ associations. And it may have been Leftwing intellectuals (we Leftwing intellectuals?) who had an idea of creating ‘communities’ that working people could not always live up to, or probably would not have wished to if that heroic or romantic role had been fully explained to them. There’s a lot to be said, as Orwell suggested in The Road to Wigan Pier, for the decency and privacy of an ordinary working class interior, so long as the householder (he said ‘man’, of course) is in employment. Nothing works well otherwise.

What they tried to do at the time was good. We may now have better ideas. But we haven’t yet got a politics to put them into practice, and planetary conjunctions like Jenkinson and Livett are extremely rare cosmic events. Both Quarry Hill’s stature and Jenkinson’s, no mere local hero he, were recognised when in 1947 John Silkin, Labour’s first Minister of Town and Country Planning, appointed him as chairman of the Stevenage New Town Development Corporation. But he died almost at once.

Something scratched beneath my memory when I first looked at Peter Mitchell’s photographs, then surfaced when I read the diary. Of course, Shelley’s ode Ozymandias the Egyptian: ‘I met a traveller from an antique land Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone Stand in the desert … Near them, on the sand, Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command, Tell that its sculptor well those passions read Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things, The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed: And on the pedestal these words appear: “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings: Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!”

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare The lone and level sands stretch far away.’

Quarry Hill Flats. Owl showing size. 28 January 1938

10 . 11

Bugs in Utopia Peter Mitchell 8 October 1988

27 January 1974

Friday 1 March 5 November 1975

30 November 18 January 1976

Even now there are still traces of the flats (crumbling steps and rusty handrails) but it is difficult to picture what used to be. As if to reinforce that which is not there, a bizarre machine was parked in the middle of the site – a giant circular saw on caterpillar tracks; poised and threatening like a surgical instrument at the ready. It could so easily have sliced up Quarry Hill, stuck it into black plastic bags and shunted the lot away before daylight.

Walking Quarry Hill, a vast curving estate of flats scheduled for demolition because of an original construction fault (I was told). They are by no means empty but had a real feeling of impoverishment clinging to them. But this wretched three-day week and emergency measures make everything feel like wartime.

To the Clock Cinema tonight to see The Long Goodbye. A gigantic, thirties provincial picture palace with sofas and a fishpond in the foyer and almost completely empty. What struck me was its similarity with Quarry Hill – its architecture and its deserted feeling.

A more flamboyant version of last year’s locals-versus-cops. Not just lobbing bricks through windscreens but overturning cars as well. Down at Quarry Hill I was photographing by the light of fires. A pathetic occasion with few people or children around and an awful air of desolation. On Victory Day or the Coronation or other Guy Fawkes Nights there must have been riotous celebrations embracing hundreds, maybe thousands, of people but tonight it all seemed rather poverty-stricken – which it was. By the time l’d got home the battle for Spencer Place was over.

Wandered around Quarry Hill where the frost had remained on the ground all day, as if the climate was colder within the circle of grey blocks.

Snapping at Quarry Hill. Whenever I determine to have a lengthy session down there the weather turns cold and miserable. But l’m slowly getting to know the pictures I want.

Demolition continues on the Marsh Lane side and the exodus of inhabitants goes on invisibly. For some reason exploring the flats is always slightly nerve-wracking, the sense of being a trespasser being far stronger than when l’m snooping around factories or worming my way into other usual sites. When people ask me what l’m photographing l can only reply “l just like taking pictures of these flats” and often they squint at me in disbelief until I vanish round the next block. Going into the blocks can be frightening.

The lifts still work, make a great crashing sound and feel like death cells, the noise advertising my presence and automatically bringing people out of their flats to investigate. Empty flats are boarded up but break-ins and vandalism look to be an everyday occurrence.

On the upper levels the wind howls in, making scary noises and slamming doors and windows. For the family last in their block, life must be hellish. All the flats l’ve seen still have their built-in stoves, weird waste disposal sinks (with instructions nailed to the wall) and strange baths that have a hand-basin welded on above the taps to save space.

Some flats are minute, others generous. l managed to get out onto the roof today and it was like going up on deck – a sense of excitement, a touch of ocean liners and the hint

Chimneys (that didn’t work!). Block nos 8 – 16. 16 April 1937

28 March

24 July 5 November

3 December

9 January 1977

of funnels from the high chimneys. Leaning over the curved roof rail I could see Leeds on the horizon!

In what looked to be a wrecked storeroom in one of the blocks I found a pile of 10˝x12 ̋ glass negatives, most of which were ground up. The one exception showed Quarry Hill when it was young – portholes, parabolas, window boxes, balconies – a great white structure sailing off into the distance. But eerie also. No people around.

Ninety-six degrees in Leeds. Drifting around Quarry Hill to fill out the day. l like these flats. The weather is baking and the ground is crawling with ladybirds – like spots of blood on the grey concrete.

A low-profile evening (as they say). Took the box down to the flats but it was deserted with only one bonfire. An end-of-the-world feeling. The flats all red and garish and a full moon slipping through the clouds. Burning mattresses and television sets like the last rites of consumerism. No fireworks, just the occasional bang of an exploding cathode ray tube.

Entering Quarry Hill from the market end I was aware of how quiet it suddenly becomes on the inside. The great curve shields the traffic din and creates the impression of entering a secret place. Going in via the side entrances the curious spiral wrought-iron gates enhance this feeling even more. Some landmark! A new firm is getting stuck into the demolition and progressing much more quickly and dramatically. The previous company seemed almost scared, reluctant even, to take things apart. Their system was to surround a block with scaffolding, stick a handful of men on the roof and nibble downwards, lowering each small section on a tall red crane. Removal would take for ever. From a distance it wasn’t too plain as to whether the flats were coming down or undergoing renovation.

Ogdens, the new boys on the job, have a giant ball and bulldozer. Crude it is, but spectacular also! Most of the tenants have gone and of those remaining most are in the great curve and distanced from the demolition. The post office, on the parade, has recently been burnt out which only leaves the bread shop still working. I got to creeping around the large boilerhouse which seems to be the centre-piece of the estate (it looks a little more decorative) but turns out to be the engine for the rubbish disposal system. As I left it occurred to me that it was probably Leeds Public Works Department whose timid methods had begun the de-construction. Maybe it wasn’t fear of the whole structure springing apart and catapulting chunks of concrete across the city but a sadness at seeing their own creation die. Perhaps some of those men had built the flats?

A cold and depressing day. The sun came out during a lull in the rain making the black asphalt football pitch glitter and shine. Somebody had thrown dozens of empty bottles from the top of the flats and coated the ground with broken glass. There was a dead mouse at the foot of a set of concrete steps and a dead butterfly on a window right at the top.

12 . 13

22 April

3 June

3 July

The City Art Gallery is being taken apart in a very deliberate manner. Each block of stone is levered out, numbered and set aside in store. Quarry Hill likewise. The flats are stripped of casements, watertanks, floor boards etc. and a section bitten off from a main block.

This isolated chunk is then bashed to the ground, leaving only the steel skeleton standing which is felled, cut up and carted off with everything else. This morning the day looked good from indoors but outside it was blowing a tornado, being far too savage to use my stepladders or approach the flats – bits were flying off the upper storeys dangerously!

So the day became wasted. The Art Gallery will go back up again but nobody will be saving Quarry Hill.

Days like this l can chase the sun right across Leeds and never stop snapping! The burnedout synagogue on Louis Street, Elysian House (a factory, some name!) over Wortley way, a rusty gas-holder on Canal Road (beautiful in the sunlight) and dandelions all over Quarry Hill where the bright orange nursery had suddenly vanished. Down on the ‘Workers’ Press’ part of the precinct in town, a spot of street theatre was in progress where a very convincing Queen (a bloke wearing a cardboard head and bust) was being berated by a chap in a battered top hat. The theme was “Stuff the Jubilee”. Union Jacks made me remember the flagpoles on the front of the flats and wondering if flags had ever flown from them.

Down to Quarry Hill Flats on the usual business. Quite a contrast (such as there can be contrasts down there) to winter conditions. The grass has grown very high with seas of chickweed dotted with vivid red poppies. No noise because the air is very still, and most of the glass has gone so perhaps the vandals got fed up and left. Just the hiss of water from burst pipes and the intermittent drone of an aeroplane flying high overhead. This place now exerts a powerful grip and intrigues me greatly. There is something other-worldly about this enormous man-made edifice slipping quietly back into the undergrowth.

And not just the structure. What’s happened to the meaning? What were the principles?

I come after the vandals and rag-and-bone men. Many flats show signs of new tenants – usually a mattress in the middle of the room, a bundle of clothes and piles of shit round the edges. Often the iron fireplaces have been pulled off the wall and baths and toilets smashed. Some flats have masses of junk in them and strange abandoned objects.

Sometimes not so strange – a pile of false teeth or an old Kodak Brownie. Others are unsettlingly eerie. One bedroom had a double bed with neat eiderdown over it and a photograph of a wedding couple in a silver frame on the bedside table as if the occupants had just popped out to the market for a minute. Or had they just been murdered in the next room? Some flats are completely empty and clean as if awaiting the new tenants, but the flats around the arch at the bottom of Regent Street had been abandoned decades ago. The dust was thick, the doors had that old-fashioned brown scumbling and distemper flaked off the walls and ceilings, sometimes exposing bits of concrete. There was no view

28 August

5 October

3 December

2 January 1978

out of the windows except for the flyover an arms-length away. No wonder they called it ‘The Berlin Wall’.

Not much happening today. The site was newly boarded up, heavy-duty style, and I couldn’t get in anywhere. A family was moving out but gave me such dirty looks that I decided against asking them for a picture. Earthworks have replaced the razed buildings at ‘The Woodpecker’ end. Very peaceful, bereft of people as usual and nobody smashing in to doss down.

Talking to a bulldozer driver who told me that the boarding-up and the stopping of work was because it is tendering time again and the rest of the coming-down will be all one contract. The contractor possessing the largest tip (and his firm had a whole railway cutting) would get it because at approximately £4 a truckload it was not the knocking-down but the getting-rid-of that mattered. A forelorn-looking totty man was clopping round but the pickings are slim these days.The last shop out of Quarry Hill has gone.

Often I take to just wandering around the flats trying to figure it all out. Certainly it feels a very mysterious place. lt is like stepping in and out of a time warp; in and out of different worlds; from dangerous places into safe places. I was reminded of City Beneath the Sea, a film l’d seen as a kid. The diver explores the long-forgotten sunken city just as the earthquake strikes and the long-silent bells ring out their last defiant gesture (even underwater!) as the towers crumble and fall in slow motion. But Leeds looks solid enough!

Well then, how about ‘The Titanic’? When this giant artefact is located (years hence when the seas have dried up) with all its earthly bits and pieces hanging out, will the discoverers be at a loss to know what it did and why it was so big? Anyway, back at base, demolition has suddenly started up and it looks as if the piecemeal approach has given way to the big bang. The roads have been blocked off and the last residents appear to have gone. I was gripped by the fact that the leviathan was vanishing before my eyes and not my camera. And all the time the growl of bulldozers and crash of falling masonry.

A bright snappy day, quite cold and breezy. Off for a good New Year’s dose of Quarry Hill. Men working there even today. The pace quickens. The dismantling is going on all over the flats so now it is possible to sneak in everywhere. The wash house with its zig-zag windows was amazing. Here was the real heart of Quarry Hill, surely. There were drying racks on wheels, washing machines and ‘Daz’ packets, motorised mangles and long ironing tables with the irons still in place. The view out showed controlled chaos encroaching on everything. Up on the roof of the great curve (where the flagpoles are solid enough) the view across the city was magnificent but bad for my vertigo. Under my feet the proof of people’s lives. A chest X-ray, love letters from prison, English tests for an Asian doctor, debt warnings from Refuge House, two-tone thirties shoes neatly placed, books from private libraries, animal cages, Sooty and Sweep wallpaper, toys and hundreds of things.

There are paintings on cave walls that endure for thousands of years but a jigsaw of

14 . 15 At the foot of the laundry steps

21 January

4 February

Neilson House, April 1940

The Last Supper nailed up over the mantlepiece (three pieces missing), a photograph of Big Tom and The Mainliners (where are they now?) and a wall covered with cut-out eyes (paper ones) last but the instant of a lifetime. All these flats had their curtains closed on the market side so to the buses speeding by everything would appear as usual, but on the other side (which, I guess, few non-residents ever saw) the microbes of time were doing their worst. Flats had been reduced to individual piles of water tanks and scrap iron, casements, steel girders, stoves, prams, lift motors, toys, planks and tinny things. With the windows out, the interiors appear like a mosaic of people’s tastes. Not much beige, hemp or oatmeal or muted frog! lts all orange and mauve and yellow and bright green and magnificently outlandish wallpaper. Perhaps a bland, continuous outside encouraged a vivid, individual response inside? lt’s obvious why beds and wardrobes got left behind. The tenants remembered only too well the struggle to manhandle everything in via the narrow stairways and useless lifts. l was there all day until the light failed.

One of the demo men told me Quarry Hill has much less than a year to go; everything is on schedule. Today the snow has gone and drizzle set in. lt didn’t look like there was a great picture trying to get out but nevertheless the impulse is overpowering and I got up to date with the destruction.

The flats are dissolving rapidly and I have been considering them from the point of view as to what happens when they are no longer there. What will the photographs mean and what will I do with them? Not that l have many. Often it was sufficient just to drift around the estate exploring the doomed ark, the camera only providing the real-world excuse for being there. Therefore some observations noted. The shape of Quarry Hill for instance? Was it formed purely by the dictates of the site or were there more devious reasons for the peculiar layout? From on high it looks like a giant hieroglyph, a fussy reject from the Nazca plains. Can it be visible from outer space as the Great Wall of China is supposed to be? And the bold way it launches itself into the city like a comet-on-the-make challenging the Town Hall – the white moderns versus the black ancients! Entering through arched tunnels, the world becomes a different place with no means of checking your bearings or taking a fix. All you see is the inside and the sky, though things do open out on the south side but by then your perception has already been affected. This is not Leeds but somewhere else with a different time altogether. Maybe the sound of children rationalised it all, their singing and shouting bouncing around undiluted because the sounds of the world outside are filtered out. The only sounds I recollect are those of glass, water and diesel engines.

How did the Hillites like their place? Did they shout from their balconies to their mates or the kids below, for there are ‘streets in the sky’ (ha) as in more recent flats? Perhaps the spaces were too large – no point in being hoarse all weekend! Stepping out of the lift (and waiting if there are more than two in your party) you turn right or left into your

The Great Curve, circa 1950s

own flat. The public landing is too small and dingy and cold (open on one side) to stand about and talk, although it might be alright for other things. Once in their home did they prefer to look at the Leeds outside or cross over to peruse their own personal territory?

Some flats gave no choice; the grey geometry in all directions. Did it feel like prison when the sun shone and windows cast grid-iron patterns across the walls? Where were the best flats? Was high up better than low down? Was the market end preferable to the gas works end? And what was that gas works doing in the middle of a housing estate anyway?

Did tenants move around the estate as they do in cities? Were there nicknames for the spaces, entrances and houses? Where did the snobs live – or the ragamuffins? Did the Irish stick together, say, or the primitive Methodists only hang out at one end? lt must have been so because even amongst the rubble there are differences. An obvious and common trace is the doormat out on the landing and the curtains discreetly drawn, almost as a gesture of modesty or of something much deeper perhaps. The families left long ago but they just might be coming back. What were the rumours about the estate from the world at large? “You needed a pass to get in you know … the things that went down that Garchey system! … Russians copied it but ours were biggest in world”. The favourite and most enduring is the “Hitler’s Headquarters” one. The more I think about it the more wonderful it sounds! Those long red banners draped over the curved frontage, Speer remodelling the triumphal approach to get rid of the Georgian petrol station and scatter around more robust versions of the City Square nymphs and tanks parked in the bus station! Well … it had an international reputation didn’t it?

So I wonder about the architects who designed and built the place. What were their aims and ideals (as Burton, ‘The Tailor of Taste’, might have put it) and what did they expect of the people that they put there? Did the tenants go from back-to-back to upand-up like a sputnik takes to the cosmos? “Eeee it were utopia” said a former tenant speaking on the radio the other day and mindful of his indoor toilet and bathroom. But where did he park his Hillman or how did he get his Vespa up to the top deck? Where did the proverbial coal go, hanging out your smalls, de-fleaing the cat and all those sorts of things? OK they cope alright in Edinburgh but this is Leeds! Was his world meant to be entirely at one with Quarry Hill, stepping out briskly only to cross the road to the market for food and the nearby (presumably) factory for wages? l’d heard there was a cinema and swimming pool incorporated into the concrete village but now there are no signs of them, nor of pubs or even a dance hall. Wouldn’t they be part of Utopia? There were shops but they seem like an afterthought added to the original design. Maybe a lot of action occurred out in the open spaces; spaces chock full of sunbathers, parties and picnics, cricket, courting couples, repairing punctures and dented wings, and certainly football on the hard ground in the centre. Maybe that’s the parameter of the creators’ vision? Those continental Machine-Age Futurists put aeroplanes on their blueprints but

16 . 17 Local excitement, Marsh Lane side, 17 September 1950

here in Leeds we put football pitches. ’Ere we go, ’ere we go, ’ere we go! Lupton Dynamos top o’ the Inner City Housing League for the tenth year running! But modern living and waste disposal units weren’t enough and perfection slipped into demolition. ln any case one man’s paradise is another man’s inferno. Quarry Hill’s time is up. How will it be remembered down the years if at all? The demo men told me that they don’t like it. I think the scale is upsetting them. l suppose there are good and bad demolition jobs the same as any other, and either this is boring or monotonous (why not?) or for something this size the returns aren’t enough or at least should be a lot more. Perhaps there is no height bonus or danger money or nothing on the side. Maybe the bombers and the oxycutters are kings of this job? lt’s a tough building. lt won’t tip over and go quietly like the brick terraces. You can’t detonate it like a power station and watch it sink into its grave. I notice a certain dignity in its death throes, even majesty when the light is right.

The Roll of Honour is easy to guess. Social workers will say it was a dumping ground for problem families, the police say a nest of villains (I was pulled in one Sunday on suspicion of pinching lead), the planners and architects (mindful of that ‘international reputation’) call it the brave but naïve world of its day, the Public Works Department saw it as an estate impossible to maintain, the City Fathers as a token of past policies totally out of keeping with the thrusting dynamics of the present, and finally the P.R. Men (New Age Hucksters) will say that it was an obvious candidate for demolition, such an eyesore on such a valuable city centre site. But what of the Leeds public? Did they love it or hate it or fall into the ‘don’t know’ category. If Leeds had grown up around the pyramids and the steamrollers were moving in, would the public be any more animated?

And what of the last residents of the concrete ant-hill? I recall the strained expressions at front doors, checking the milk on the doorstep or the damage to their ex-neighbour’s flat. A little suspicion goes a long way. Some had acquired big dogs and had warnings crudely painted on their balconies. They would be glad to be out of it. But even now at the height of the blitz some flats appear organised and immaculate with spotless windows and mops and pot plants on the balcony. Little islands of false security. Are these tenants reluctant to leave? Do they have a special liking for their estate because to them it has always been home? Maybe they regard themselves as special? Are they standing by principles long-forgotten by the rest of us and have decided to tough it out to the very end? l like to think so. This time next year all will be gone and citizens of Leeds will say, “Oh when was that then? Funny, we never saw it go.” Maybe some will wish that they’d spoken up at the time whilst others breathe a sigh of relief that a vexing embarrassment has gone for good.

Nobody likes monuments to fallibility; even war memorials now puzzle most people.

Even so perhaps the empty site will induce a sense of loss, herald a change or indicate a shift of some unexplained sort. On the ground the market traders will curse the winds

12 February

6 March Quarry Hill Day

8 March 24 March

27 March 6 May

that howl across the new plain and motorists navigating into Leeds from points north will find their favourite lighthouse swept off the rocks. Up in space the flying saucers spin round the earth for ever, scanning the Northern Hemisphere in vain for that land mark that gives them permission to land. So to the end of this note. A memory of last summer when the day was hot with the grass waist-high with an abundance of insects and wild flowers (well, daisies and rose bay willow herb), a white gypsy stallion tethered by one of the blocks and the whole estate as peaceful as a country graveyard. A jet flew over, interrupting the calm and made me think of those aeroplanes in the Pacific jungles that had never made it back to base and over the years become half machine, half jungle, part grave and part monument.

A week of intensive shooting. Down there every day because the sense of urgency is most palpable. There was a heavier fall of snow last night, the most apt description being ‘Stalingrad’. l was approached by the foreman who wanted pictures for his scrapbook (his C.V.?) and who told me that Hardwicks had 30 men on site, the job had 7 months to run and the great curve comes down in a fortnight. This threw me into a panic. What about Quarry Hill’s last message to the world? A deal was struck. Noel lets me up on the roof and l give him a set of photos. Also – when the moment is right – we do a shot of the demolition crew. Others will have filmed the builders and the tenants but l will have the picture of the men who took it all away. As it was getting dark I spied a skip at the bottom of the boilerhouse steps filled with broken engine casings and enormous pistons.

That was it then! The engines that drove Quarry Hill! Gone!

The effect was truly miraculous. The wind wasn’t quite right but it didn’t matter – it was just so exciting to see all those colours flying over the grey battleship of Quarry Hill.

From the signals book I could have sent “stop I have something important to communicate” or “l am aground I cannot be refloated.” Or “fuck you”, simple, direct, topical even. In the end the last words of Quarry Hill were everybody’s last words, “Goodbye World.”

Our un-named cat is playing with a rusty clockwork mouse that l found on the top floor of the great curve on Monday. The last mouse out of Quarry Hill – it must be sinking fast!

After the flag episode the compulsion is subsiding and it was a bit of an effort snapping today. There is only one more photograph that I need. The foreman was saying that it was the biggest single demolition job in Europe. Last week it was only England! The site, now mostly cleared, does look massive but its unique presence has long gone. lt’s like the back lot of a film set.

A terrific wind giving a bright clear day. This produced a curious performance. As usual the casements were banging about but today they were all flapping in unison. Backwards and forwards, ebbing and flowing like the tide running out. An ominous slow hand-clap.

A damp tour of the Hill this morning. Just the Regent Street entrance standing, not much to photograph. Some men sorting steelwork, the ball and crane swinging away, all

18 . 19 ‘The Intruder’, 1949

22 May 1978

8 October 1988

the rubble dumped on the inside of where the great curve used to be ready for trucking off, the remainder of the site bleak and empty save for some hillocks of top soil in preparation for ‘landscaping’. From the middle of the site you can now see right up The Headrow, that funny petrol station now looking even more stupid (but having out-lived the flats), and right across the market to the railway that bisects a graveyard with St Peter’s Church beyond. No more grey lines of windows knitting everything together. Not only will those stall-holders feel a chill from the east but an economic one as well. Ghosts aren’t noted for their high spending!

Early in the morning l’d alerted Noel to quit bashing the arch and we’ll go for the shot during the men’s dinner break. Returning midday, he walked all his men over and they got ready to be photographed (i.e. they managed to find a few hardhats). The weather was summery and the men were all keen and into a sense of occasion. A crane and extraneous gear had to be shifted out of shot and I got set up, eventually having to shoot from the top of the crane. l’d timed things for a good moment – The Last Arch of Quarry Hill! The workers neatly tucked under it with one character wandering in at the last minute and steadying himself against the iron entrails in the foreground. These are the men (it said in the viewfinder) who took away your hopes and fears, your triumphs and your failures; they are as time itself. They knew it; there was none of the usual mooning or flicking it out. Naturally l’d loaded up the car with booze to complete the celebration.

It didn’t last long but then neither did Quarry Hill.

It is difficult to picture the flats. New schemes rise and fall, the gypsies come and go and a fun-fair appears a couple of times a year as if Quarry Hill is reverting to its earlier more leisurely days. “Leeds (the postmark used to say) Motorway City of The Seventies” but on a letter I got the other day, it says nothing. Once, people felt an integral part of their city, and their pride and dignity came naturally from within that city consciousness. As The Twentieth Century runs out, development companies and roadside hoardings now tell us how to be proud and what to believe. How do you describe Leeds these days? The more l think about that the more puzzled I become. Sometimes I think that the daring and drive have slipped into neutral, that the risks that give life its edge and measure have been laundered away. “Neither work nor leisure” somebody has scrawled on the Kirkstall viaduct. l don’t know what it means but the implied menace stays with me. Crossing under the motorway by ‘The Woodpecker’ I took a look back at the giant saw but already that was lost in the darkness. Time to make something of the photographs. Maybe a book or something? On the dedication page I’ll put the tin mouse and a Burns poem – the one about “best laid schemes.” Up on past St James’s and Beckett Street cemetery, into the wind, heading for Spencer Place and home. So long Quarry Hill … l took your picture but you took my mind!

Quarry Hill, Saturday 8th October, 1988

20 . 21

FOUNDATIONS

‘Red Ruin For Leeds’ Poster. Summons against Mr. Rowland Holgate.

Intimation that Mr. Rowland Holgate, Secretary and treasurer of Leeds Rent Collector’s and Estate Agents’ Association, would be cited as defendant at Leeds Police Court today, for alleged contravention of by-laws by exhibiting on his motor car a poster entitled ‘Red Ruin For Leeds’, was given at yesterday’s opening of the clearance inquiry at the Civic Hall.

Yorkshire Post, 23 October 1935

Implementation: Leeds Corporation Housing Committee. First annual visit to Estates 28 May 1936. C/Blackah, Ald Walker, C/Brett, Mr Radley, Mr Livett (The Architect), C/Pick, C/Adamson, C/Jenkinson (The Chairman), Mr Pagdin, Mr Thornton (from l to r)

2. From the Statement made to the Committee by the Deputation from the West Yorkshire Society of Architects (Messrs. Gribbon, Bain, Jones, Bowman, and Paxton).

By pure artistry in simple inexpensive architectural design, together with very large scale lay-out of courtyards and amenities, some of the Vienna working class flats make the old Viennese Baroque palaces look trivial and tawdry.

They have tackled their block dwellings on the same scale and thoroughness that Leeds has tackled the Headrow. Their best scheme, the Karl Marx House, has a frontage of about half-a-mile by 120 yards wide – that is to say, from the Leeds Town Hall down to where the Headrow meets Quarry Hill, or nearly the whole length of Kirkstall Road from West Street up to the Viaduct. The whole unit is welded into one building scheme of extreme simplicity, inexpensively but architecturally designed for large mass effects – thousands of standardised windows relieved by paint in bright and varied colours, each flat spotlessly kept and adorned with a balcony lined with flowers. To see all this under a summer sky in Vienna is to see a very fine example of humanised architecture, largely due to the problem having been tackled in a sympathetic and imaginative manner …

‘DECENT HOUSES FOR ALL’, March 1933

Inspiration: Karl Marx Hof. Workers’ housing in Vienna, 1931

Quarry Hill from the south-west, summer 1978

1 CONTINUITY MANCHESTER:

This is the BBC Home Service from the North of England. “Quarry Hill Experiment”.

(OVER TO LEEDS)

(Fade In)

2 GRAMS:

Opening music on disc, as arranged

(Fade behind)

3 JOHNSON:

(narrating) Leeds, Yorkshire. Population: five hundred and five thousand, four hundred. Fifth largest provincial city in England. Centre of the clothing trade. Known for its University – its Civic Hall – its Art Gallery –

4 YORKS VOICE:

(new acoustic) Aye – an’ for Quarry Hill Flats! Don’t forget that!

5 AMERICAN VOICE:

Quarry Hill! Say, that sure brings back memories. I lived right there in those flats for six months. That was quite a while ago, and it seems the heck of a long way now from li’l old Noo York. But I’ll never forget it – never!

6 FRENCH WOMAN:

Quarry Hill! Ay, yes! That was my home ten years ago, after the Nazis invaded my country. Now I have returned again to my native France – yet sometimes I still think of Quarry Hill as home.

7 COCKNEY VOICE:

Quarry Hill! Blimey, wasn’t that where the corp. got six weeks in the glasshouse for lettin’ a bit o’ skirt spend ’arf the night in the guardroom? That wasn’t ’arf a do, I can tell yer. Nah, I’ll never forget that!

8 JOHNSON:

(narrating) And that’s the first strange thing in a strange story. An American rubber planter who lives in his luxurious home outside New York. A French woman married to a doctor and spending her days in the sunshine of the Riviera. And a cockney barrow boy from Camberwell. Why should a block of flats in a Yorkshire city mean so much to them? And, if it comes to that, why should it mean anything to you?

Script (as broadcast) ‘QUARRY HILL EXPERIMENT’ A factual report on thirteen years of communal living. Written and produced by Patrick Campbell. LEEDS STUDIO PRE-RECORDING: REHEARSALS: TRANSMISSION:

Wednesday, 4th April, 2.0 – 6.0 p.m. at Quarry Hill Thursday, 5th April, 10.0 a.m. – 6.0 p.m. (Studio) Friday, 6th April, 10.0 a.m. – 6.0 p.m. (Studio) Friday, 6th April, 1951 : 8.0 – 9.0 p.m. BASIC H. S. (To be recorded off transmission)

22 . 23

HOUSING DIRECTOR

No. 1

1935

NEWSCUTTING BOOK

To Tell You The Truth by Richardson.

The Leeds Housing Committee are contemplating installing a new system of refuse disposal in the block of flats which is to be erected at Quarry Hill. The refuse is dropped down a chute in the region of the kitchen sink, and is sucked through underground pipes to a disposal station.

I know nothing of the advantages of this system, but I can foresee some of the disadvantages. If the chute happened to be too near the sink lots of pieces of soap will be disappearing down the chute and no end of washing-up. Should the suction part of the apparatus get a bit out of hand ornaments from the mantlepiece, the aspidistra, Ma’s best hat and the dog (unless chained to the table leg) will mysteriously disappear.

On the other hand one might get the rent man (or better still, the Housing Committee) to stand near the chute some time when it is really going full blast.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 5 April 1935

The Garden of Rest (a.k.a. The Village Green) looking east

1936

24 . 25

The Kirkstall Road scheme

Foundations for the Great Curve, looking south-west Largest Municipal Centre in Europe. Five thousand tenement flats to be built in Leeds.

The Quarry Hill experiment.

Local authorities throughout the country are watching with keen interest the experiment which is being carried out on a large scale in Leeds of constructing huge blocks of tenement flats or grouped dwellings for thousands of families who will be dispossessed by the slum clearance schemes.

It is expected by late Summer of next year the Quarry Hill scheme, which is the first of its kind to be embarked upon, will have been completed with 939 dwellings and 20 shops. Some of these should be ready for occupation at the end of this year. Then at a future date, between 2,000 and 2,500 similar flats may be constructed in a series of blocks forming a self contained unit on Kirkstall Road. If this number should be required it would form, it is stated, the largest municipal centre of flats in Europe.

Yorkshire Post, 29 April 1936

The Kitson House telephone from the north-east

26 . 27

Progress photographs of marble slabs. Blocks 1 - 5. 28 November, 4 December, 12 December 1936

Huge Flats Scheme. Speedy work in Leeds. Pioneer methods used. Builders’ hopes.

An interesting example of high-speed building, on lines that have not hitherto been employed in this country, is now to be seen at Quarry Hill, Leeds, where the huge block of Corporation flats are taking shape. Although only one team of men is at work so far, over 500 concrete units have been laid. When further teams are set to work the walls and floors of the block will spring up with amazing speed. By adopting the Mopin system, the contractors have taken a pioneer step towards overcoming the shortage of output in the building trade at Peak times such as that now existing in Leeds owing to the slum clearance drive. At Quarry Hill the Mopin system is revolutionising the position.

‘Now we have made a start we are hoping to get quickly into our stride’, an official of Tarran Industries told a Yorkshire Evening News reporter today. ‘It is a method of building construction which will make history in the British Isles’, he added.

Yorkshire Evening News, 29 June 1936

Thoresby House from the south

View showing storeroom to Blocks 1 - 5. 14 April 1938 Photographer’s dilemma 1: whether to go for the human interest?

28 . 29

Archway in construction. Blocks 8 - 16. 17 November 1936

Neilson House from the south-east

A passing fashion of the day

30 . 31

Municipal Elections. Rev. C. Jenkinson and ‘The Red Flag’.

A strong criticism of the Rev. C. Jenkinson, the originator of the Leeds Labour housing policy, for ‘using the influence of his cloth’ in support of revolutionary ideas was uttered by Mr. R.C. Davies, the former Conservative leader in the City Council, at a meeting in Roundhay Ward. ‘What a sorry spectacle it is’, Mr. Davies said, ‘that a minister of the Church of England should attend a meeting in a picture house on a Sunday night wearing his cassock on the platform, using his influence as his cloth would attract to him and his position as a minister would bring him, and sing in a public audience the verses of ‘The Red Flag’. I wonder how many of you who are here tonight have heard ‘The Red Flag’ sung and know what is implied by it. It has verses and a chorus which do nothing else but incite people who sing it and people who hear it to a state of rebellion against the ordered government and law and to imply that their only method to gain freedom shall be to gain the freedom that may be brought about, if it is possible, by revolution. There is a verse which calls attention to The French Revolution, to Moscow and to violence in Chicago, and it ends up with a chorus relating to martyrdom’.

Yorkshire Post, 28 October 1936

Increased recruitment for the Housing Committee

Wright House from the east

32 . 33

Leeds Flats Scheme. First block ready soon.

The Summer should see the completion of a considerable portion of the whole scheme of 998 flats. This forecast was given yesterday by a representative of the builders, Tarran Industries of Hull.

At Quarry Hill, 157 men are working, 91 being engaged on the building work and the other 66 in the factory. Provided the unions were agreeable, overtime would be worked when the longer days arrived. Once the shell of the flats has been assembled, work will proceed very quickly. Painting will be done by gun spray and every effort will be made to speed up the finishing generally. The flats, it is claimed, will be the most modern of their kind in Europe.

Leeds Mercury, 8 January 1937

Quarry Hill Flats 1937 - 40. Explosives supplied to blast rock for sewers

1937

Steelwork to units, Quarry Hill Flats (Oastler House circa May 1938)

Neilson House entrance from the south-west

34 . 35

Wire working for concrete slabs. 15 December 1936

The steel skeleton, Eastgate

Moulds for concrete slabs etc. 15 December 1936

Non vibrating moulds. 24 December 1936

Marble slabs vibrating machine. 12 December 1936

9 LIVETT:

(pre-recording on disc) – BAND 3 - 1´ 20˝

10

The Mopin system of construction consists, briefly, of erecting a slender steel framework and hanging on it prefabricated concrete blocks, which fit into each other on a tongue and socket principle. To speed up the job, all the blocks were made on the site in a special factory erected for the purpose. Altogether we made 524,634 units of various sizes.

11

The steel framework looked most insecure as it went up and gave rise to a good deal of ill-informed criticism. It was often referred to a “the bird cage”!

(Fade in)

1 YORKS VOICE:

(new acoustic) Bah gum, look at that Joe! T’whole thing’s swaying in t’wind! It’ll never stand up – never!

2 YORKS WOMAN:

I don’t trust them new-fangled ideas. French, isn’t it? I thought as much. Looks to me like a child’s building set!

3 ANOTHER MAN:

There’s no sense in it, you know. Trying to save brass I reckon. It won’t stand up for five minutes. First real gust o’ wind’ll lay the whole place flat!

4 LIVETT:

(pre-recording on disc) – BAND 4 - 30˝ And when the building was finished, those same critics talked about it as a “fortress”, so strong and firm did it look! Even a Nazi bomb which fell inside the estate in 1941 did no more than break a few windows and knock a little plaster off the walls. My own estimate is that it will stand up for at least another hundred years.

Script pages 8/9

1938

36 . 37 ‘Light’-Houses in Leeds.

Sun balconies at the Quarry Hill flats in Leeds are of the special type illustrated above. A number of flats will be ready in March.

The estimated cost of this minature town is £370,000 and there will be a number of shops, a communal laundry, a clinic and a unique refuse disposal system.

‘These will be the finest flats for wage-earners in Europe’, the Alderman commented, ‘and in my opinion, when the full scheme is completed, the public will be amazed at the beauty of it’.

He added that experts from all parts of the country were periodically visiting Quarry Hill, and recently an American expert also examined the flats.

Yorkshire Evening News, 19 February 1938

Quarry Hill – Construction of Verandas. Blocks 17 - 23. 5 January 1938

Britain’s Architects Are Watching Leeds. Modern flats for slum dwellers.

I have just been to see a derelict slum house in South Leeds. The walls were damp – paper hung from them in strips. The ceilings were black. Banisters had been torn from stairs. This three-roomed hovel has been deserted, thank heaven, except by rats and vermin; but I learned that not long ago it was actually inhabited by 10 people. Six of them slept in one room. They called it ‘home’. That condemned house is a sample – a particularly bad one, I agree – of the type of dwelling from which most of the 3,000 people who will soon be housed in the new Quarry Hill flats, will be rescued.

These £370,000 flats are the inspiration of Mr. R.A.H. Livett, Housing Director of Leeds. He hopes to see his first tenants installed early this year. His task has not been easy. The site presented innumerable snags – such as old cellars, gasometer bases, coal-holes, culverts and disused burial-grounds.

These are some of the reasons (plus the shortage of steel) why the flats (begun in April 1935) won’t be ready

by April 1938, according to schedule. But they should be finished within a year.

Yorkshire Post, 5 January 1938

Wright House from the south-west

38 . 39

Blocks 17 - 23 under construction early 1938

Meeting Leeds Housing Needs. First section of Quarry Hill Flats completed. To be opened

by Lord Mayor.

After seeing from the outside for many months nothing but gaunt steel framework, varying from two to eight storeys on this site of 26 acres, the first impression of a typical flat, furnished for the needs of a family from a clearance area, will be very favourable. The structure is substantial, the rooms are airy and light, and additional amenities provide for a comfortable home, with reasonable co-operation of the tenants themselves. For exhibition purposes a flat with three bedrooms has been tastefully furnished partly under the Corporation’s own scheme for the supply of furniture and furnishings.

Mr. R.A.H. Livett, Housing Director, who is responsible for the layout and general design, must be congratulated on the facilities provided not only in the flats themselves, but also on the site, of which only 40 per cent is built on, leaving 59 per cent available for play grounds and open spaces, and 27 per cent for roads and special access roads.

Yorkshire Post, 29 March 1938

Neilson House

Living-room. Quarry Hill Flats. 29 March 1938 The Photographer’s dilemma 2: flowers or radio; natural or flash?

40 . 41 Leeds Quarry Hill Flats. All points of difference removed.

The Housing Committee of the Leeds City Council yesterday settled the dispute over the building of the Quarry Hill flats, Leeds. Tarran Industries, Ltd., are the builders and the committee accepted the tender of Tarrans for £27,263 for the construction of a refuse disposal station and other equipment.

Ald. Blackah stated that the station was designed to deal with the refuse not only of the Quarry Hill flats but of a further 2,500 flats to be erected in the adjoining areas of Marsh Lane and York Road.

In the work, there would be included a laundry, two flats for caretakers, two shops, a wireless relay station, a store for hawkers barrows, and an electricity sub-station.

Yorkshire Post, 18 December 1937 Erection of steelworks. Blocks 81 - 83. 16 September 1938

Central Bus Station Leeds.

Services begin operating today from the first completed section of the new Leeds Central Omnibus Station, built at a total cost of £44,000, which was opened yesterday by the Lord Mayor of Leeds (Alderman John Badlay). The new station is situated near Leeds Markets, and faces Quarry Hill Flats. The second portion has yet to be built. The Lord Mayor and his party toured the station after he had performed the opening ceremony. They visited the air raid shelter constructed beneath reinforced concrete to accommodate 150 people. The Lady Mayoress opened the café and members of the party were presented with pieces of white heather.

Yorkshire Post, 1 September 1938 Quarry Hill Flats. Interior living room. October 1943

A Garden Air-Raid Shelter. Hints issued by Home Office.

The accompanying sketch illustrates an emergency trench to accommodate six persons which can be rapidly prepared in a garden. It is drawn from designs prepared by the Home Office.

A shelter thus made is, of course, not gas proof, but it would provide excellent protection against blast and splinters from high-explosive bombs. The occupants should take their gas masks with them to the shelter in case of gas attack.

Manchester Guardian, 26 September 1938

York House

42 . 43 First in. R.G. Tarran, Mrs Conway and children, Alderman Blackah, Lord Mayor Badlay (from l to r)

Quarry Hill Flats. First section of Leeds scheme opened. Housing claim ‘finest estate of its kind when completed’.

The first completed section of Quarry Hill flats, of which 938 will be erected by Leeds Corporation in the next twelve months at an approximate cost of half a million pounds, was opened by the Lord Mayor (Alderman J. Badlay) yesterday morning in the presence of 300 prominent citizens.

This section, which contains 40 flats, has been named Lupton House after the late Alderman Charles Lupton, whose vision resulted in the construction of The Headrow.

‘We believe that we shall yet see roses growing on Quarry Hill’, said Alderman Blackah. ‘The Housing Committee make the bold claim for this estate that when completed, it will not only be the finest of its kind for wage-earners in this country but also in the world’. A very large number of applications for these flats have been received and are now under consideration. Four families will move into them today.

The first, Mr. and Mrs. Conway and their three children, who have lived in the Ellerby Lane area, received a dressing table and tallboy from Mr. R.G. Tarran, of Tarran Industries, Limited, Hull, the general contractors.

Yorkshire Post, 31 March 1938

Invitation and souvenir brochure of the opening ceremony

Moynihan House and Lupton House from the south-west

44 . 45

ast, 24

Fro

outh-e m the s

38

May 19

Victoria House from the north-east

46 . 47

1939

New Flats, Quarry Hill, Leeds. 19 February 1939 (Jackson and Lupton Houses)

Royal Visit To Leeds Today.

The Duke, who is also Vice-Patron of the National Council of Social Service, also made a tour of the Leeds Quarry Hill flats which represent perhaps the most ambitious rehousing programme ever undertaken by any local authority.

Flags and bunting bedecked the Leeds Quarry Hill flats for the Duke’s visit, and windows and balconies were crowded with onlookers. It was the home of Mr. & Mrs Atkinson and their three children of 72 Jackson House which was selected for the visit of the Duke. He walked there preceded by crowds of cheering and excited children, back from school for dinner.

Inside the building the Duke of Kent was introduced to Mr. Atkinson and his wife, their three children – Joan (10), John (14), and Irene (17) – and his mother-in-law Mrs Burke who is 77.

Joan is now the proudest girl in Leeds for she obtained the autograph of the Royal visitor.

‘Will you please sign this, your Royal Highness?’, she asked offering her book in which the Duke wrote ‘George’ in a beautiful hand. He asked Mr. Atkinson where he lived before coming here and was told at Burmantofts in Bean Street.

In further conversation with him, the Duke learned that he was a builder’s labourer, had been five weeks out of work, but now had prospects of work.

The Royal party was shown around the flat by Mrs Atkinson and the Duke spoke to the children before leaving for the Civic Hall, where he had lunch with the Lord Mayor (Alderman Rowland Winn).

Yorkshire Evening Post, 27 June 1939

H.R.H. The Duke of Kent. Visit to Quarry Hill Flats

Victoria House

48 . 49 Raid Demonstrations.

The model includes about 200 houses of different types, a church, a school and two public houses and represents the sort of area an air raid warden would have allocated to him during a raid. In four sections, it is operated electrically, some of its houses being lit up, and, with the aid of a little gunpowder, realistic air raids are staged on it.

After the houses have been ‘bombed’ and ‘burned’ they can be re-erected in a few seconds.

The Committee accepted the model, which was eventually taken to the air-raid wardens’ headquarters in Clarendon Road.

Yorkshire Post, 20 April 1939

Kitson House from the east

Distrust of Flats. Considered ‘immoral’ and ‘disreputable’ by English.

Englishmen can be very snobbish about their homes, said Mr. Anthony Bertram, the writer and housing authority, speaking at a luncheon at the Housing Centre in London yesterday. He attacked the unreasonable prejudice, which existed against flat-life, saying there was a widespread feeling that there was something immoral and disreputable about flats, which were thought to be largely inhabited by actresses, Lords and foreigners. Yet in London one already found a large number of people living in flats, and even in luxury flats, which were regarded by many people as being more immoral than the other kind.

But to live in a flat in Manchester, Liverpool, Leeds, or in smaller provincial cities, is relatively rare and therefore regarded as more suspicious.

Yorkshire Post, 26 April 1939

and from the west

Tour Of The Estates.

Like landed gentry, the City Fathers took a personal pride in the welfare of their tenants, and, at the 20,000th municipal dwelling to be completed since the War, they were received almost royally by the contractors.

A couple of oddments from the tour are these. One, the children of what we used to call the working classes are taking far more quickly to the bathing costume as suitable wear for Leeds than children in more expensive areas. Two, that a group of builders on one of the estates yesterday set what may become a lunch-time fashion. They lay back wearing nothing above their waists, and sunbathed.

Yorkshire Post, 6 June 1939

Kitson House from the west

50 . 51

The Progress Of Quarry Hill. Flats to have ‘Village Green’.

The Quarry Hill flats refuse to be overshadowed by the war. Day by day important changes are taking place within Quarry Hill’s 26 acres. Today dustbins are being taken away from Quarry Hill; by the end of this week the refuse disposal system will be in full working order. Many of the flats are already connected to the central incinerator. Tin cans, broken glass, cinders and refuse of all kinds are already being thrown down the sink. By the end of this month the clothes posts will be taken away and the laundry and ironing rooms thrown open to the women of Quarry Hill. The central ‘green’ is being piled high with building material from all parts of the 26 acres. The accumulation will be taken away shortly, and next year the ‘green’ should really become a Quarry Hill village green.

Underground air raid shelters are being rapidly constructed – in peace time they will be covered with gardens and tennis courts – roads through this astonishing ‘estate’ are being made and the main structural work on the flats is complete.

The best way to see Quarry Hill is to walk round with the Housing Director of Leeds Mr. R.A.H. Livett, and that was my priviledge yesterday. It was like being taken over an elegant country estate by an owner who is very modest and yet knows all the time that he really has ‘quite a good little place out here’.

Leeds Mercury, 7 November 1939

York House from the north-west

From the south-east. July 1939

1940s

52 . 53

Quarry Hill Flats. Typical Views. 764/CPS 1. April 1940 (Wright House)

It is a sociological mystery, a strange sidelight on England’s loneliest colony, this story of Leeds 3,000 Who Refuse To Mix. Refugees from Singapore, Shanghai and Hong Kong; munition workers, engineers, window cleaners; Jews, Catholics, members of the Church of England; Yorkshire folk and Southerners; old age pensioners and school children; families of 11 and hermits on their own – all live in Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds’ city-within-a-city, most self contained and yet the loneliest community in England.

Just short of 3,000 people live in the 938 flats. Although the flats have a communal laundry, a British Restaurant and a social centre there is little neighbourly feeling between them. Yet this oddly aloof collection of people is capable of surprising generosity.

Unattributed press cutting, 3 February 1943

Moynihan House from the south-west

54 . 55

Raid Ordeal in Flats.

The blast passed through the archway of the block and went up the lift shaft of a block behind, wrenching doorlocks as if they had been jemmied. In spite of all this, the persons in the shelter, with only the width of the road between them and the bomb, suffered no more than scratches when the force of the explosion threw them against walls.

‘They are grand shelters’, a woman from the flats told our reporter today. ‘Those who built them had brains and put them into the job’.

Yorkshire Evening News, 2 September 1940

Rug-making in the social centre. Marjorie Green, May Pymblock, Mr. Brown (teacher), Margaret ?, Joyce Hutchinson (from l to r)

Spitfire Fund.

The first ‘City of Leeds’ Spitfire will soon be in the air taking its toll of enemy raiders. The pennies and pounds of Leeds are playing their part in our great fight for freedom. All sections have joined in this grand effort that has resulted so far in the fine total of £5507: 14/4d.

Yorkshire Evening News, 3 September 1940

Wright House

56 . 57

1941 Age 16. Doreen Beaumont and Mary Brady (l to r)

Block Of Flats, Hotel Damaged By Salvo In Centre Of N.E. Town.

A large block of working-class flats was extensively damaged and every room in a hotel was wrecked when a German raider dropped a salvo of bombs on the centre of a North-East town early yesterday morning. It was stated by the Ministry of Information afterwards that 50 people had been rendered temporarily homeless from the block of flats. One girl who confessed that she had been watching from the window of her flat described the explosion as ‘terrific’.

‘There was a great flash and then I ducked’, she said. ‘The air was filled with flying pieces. All our windows were broken and I suppose I was very lucky not to be injured. I shall get under cover next time, I assure you!’

Yorkshire Evening News, 2 September 1940

Priestley House

58 . 59

Laundry block interior views. 23 November 1939

The Ironing Room

Drying horses 1978

The Progress Of Quarry Hill. Flats to have ‘Village Green’.

He led the way to the laundry, where workmen were beginning to paint the walls a pale green. Sixty-four washers, rinsers and dryers are ready and next door the ironing room is plugged for electric irons. ‘This is one of our pleasantest rooms, actually’, Mr. Livett said, and I agreed with him. Sun was streaming through the windows and, just off the room, there was a balcony for women wanting to have a chat after their wash day. ‘We assume the women will want to be sociable over ironing’, Mr. Livett said, and that is the way things have been thought out at Quarry Hill.

Leeds Mercury, 7 November 1939

From the ironing room looking east

‘When We Build Again’ circa 1943 Our work in the Laundry

60 . 61

Gas Griller 1978 Interior of scullery showing working of Garchey System. October 1943

The Dustbin Superseded. Yorkshire Evening News, 16 April 1937 No Tin Can Tattoo For Leeds Flat Tenants. New-style rubbish chutes will be silent.

Visions of sleeping tenants being awakened by the sound of rubbish hurtling through the specially-built chutes in Leeds Corporation’s Quarry-hill flats were dispelled by officials today.

Prospective tenants had been wondering whether their rest might be disturbed and their nerves frayed during the day by the rattling of empty tins, or the banging of ashes, as they jostled down the chutes – a feature of the Garchey system of refuse disposal, which is being used at Quarry-hill for the first time in this country.

Mr. Livett said that the pipes of the chutes were made of earthenware and enclosed in ducts made of soundproof material. The ducts were covered by metal-faced boards, he said, and were therefore quite noiseless. ‘I do not think for a moment they will be noisy’, he said. ‘They are well enclosed and no one need worry about them’.

So the fact that the people on every storey above may have had baked beans out of a tin for tea will not annoy Mr. Smith on the ground floor when he listens-in to the football results on the radio. To use Quarryhill parlance the tins will be silent – as in chute.

Yorkshire Evening News, Spring 1937

Moynihan House

62 . 63 Diplomatic Visit.

Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds these days are quite a centre for the Diplomatic Corps. A short time ago they were visited by the Peruvian Ambassador.

Today Mrs E. Donnelly, of 12a Oastler House, had the pleasure of offering morning tea to Dr. Don Miguel A. Rivay Abreu, Cuban minister, and Senor Don Miguel Ydigoras Fuentes, Guatamalan Minister.

Telegraph & Argus, 4 February 1948

View from 48 Neilson House (the Churchill family)

‘Finish Our Job’ Is The Heart-Cry At Quarry Hill. England’s ‘greatest social experiment’.

Quarry Hill Flats first block was officially opened, with drums, trumpets and red carpets, in May, 1936. Built

by Tarran, the flats were the wonder of England. The war interrupted the grandiose project. Nine years have passed since then. And Quarry Hill Flats, many of its 960 families think, is a grey elephant … not exactly a white elephant for the Corporation Housing Department collect a goodly sum in rents. But untended, neglected, discouraged.

From time to time visitors from abroad – housing experts, architects, municipal delegates, ambassadors of Latin American countries, ministers of trade, distinguished politicians – visit Quarry Hill and are shown over the flats.

‘But there’s a lot of eyewash laid on’, one of the resident maintenance staffs said bitterly. ‘Visitors are shown over specially painted and prepared flats, and the black spots are avoided. We know’.

‘The place is so huge’, said Mr. Killingbeck, ‘that individual tenants, however public-spirited can do little.

Quarry Hill Flats are all right. Most of the tenants are good working-class people. But the whole place needs just that bit of finishing … good lawns, decent paint, social amenities that are not skimped’.

Yorkshire Observer, 26 September 1949

Priestley House

64 . 65 Oastler House looking north

Drawings from Life – 17. One Roof: 2,500 Tenants.

The curving bulk of Quarry Hill loomed imposingly, not to say, imperiously, through an October mist. In all directions towered grey cliffs with their rows of dwelling cells: humanity on the wholesale scale, 700 families, 2,500 souls spread and superimposed in seven layers. I was reminded of the more impressive shots in ‘Metropolis’, the silliest film that ever came out of the old Germany. Quarry Hill is the handwriting, the signature of our times; a signature in steel and concrete scrawled across 26 acres near the centre of Leeds.

Some people say ‘If that is the signature of our times, so much the worse for 1941’. Others say ‘So much the better’.

Yorkshire Observer, 10 October 1941

Oastler House looking south

1950s

66 . 67

Panorama of the estate from the south-east, circa mid-1950s

Bins Rushed To Leeds Flats.

Leeds City Cleansing Department today rushed dustbins to about 150 residents in Neilson House, and parts of Savile, York and Moynihan Houses, Quarry Hill Flats, affected by a breakdown in the automatic sanitation system. The fault is suspected to be a fracture in the main pipe, and refuse is not being drawn through because of loss of vacuum.

Yorkshire Evening News, 16 November 1949

Neilson House

Moynihan Housee

Thoresby House

68 . 69 The Great Curve. 31 May 1957

Syrians Plan Some Flats Like Quarry Hill. Delighted by Europe’s Largest.

Many hundreds of visitors must have inspected these flats since they rose from the centre of the city almost twenty years ago and the most recent party to tour them was the Syrian Press delegation, with its editors and directors of the foremost papers in Syria who are now visiting Britain and collecting impressions.

On Wednesday they were met by the Resident Housing Manager, Mr. N. Loughton, who showed them round and expalined various points. He took them to the flat owned by Mr. and Mrs. Shotler, a flat in Oastler House where they were able to examine the interior thoroughly. The flat was very modern and smart.

The Syrians were able to compare them with the ones they had back home, but whilst Quarry Hill housed an average of three people they housed five. After one of the delegates had caused amusement by examining the lift too carefully and had sailed up and down in it for a time, not knowing how to stop it, the party moved on to the laundry.

They praised the British for such a magnificent achievement for the benefit of the working class and as they left they gazed back at the great circle of flats and one could see the Leeds Bus Station and roads dissolving into the familiar surroundings of one of their own cities and the Syrian equivalent of Quarry Hill rising proudly to the deep blue sky.

Leeds Guardian, 27 July 1951

Oastler House from the north

70 . 71 Three Aerials To Serve 938 Flats. Piped TV coming to Leeds.

Three rooftop areials will shortly be erected on Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds. They are to be communal aerials for the use of every family wanting to share them and will represent the completion of the first stage in a plan to make piped television available in each of the 938 flats at Quarry Hill.

Wiring work now being done at the flats is one of the largest schemes of relay wiring in this country, Mr. S.T. Jones, general manager of The West Riding Radio Relay Service Ltd, the firm doing it, told me last night. ‘It is a gigantic task’, he added.

Yorkshire Post, 23 November 1953 Wives. Pat Andrews, Grandma Dargan, baby Pamela Andrews, Eileen Dargan with Jackie Dargan (l to r)

Husbands. Jack Dargan, Jack Tuke, George Dargan with babies Jackie Dargan, Jacqueline, Anne & Christine Tuke (l to r)

Quarry Hill Flats To Get Post Office.

Quarry Hill Flats Tenant Association have been trying for three years to secure a sub-post office on the estate.

Miss Bacon told the Y.E. News today that she had received the following letter from Mr. Ness Edwards, Postmaster General.

‘You will recall that in answer to your question in the House of Commons on April 25 about the provision of a post office at Quarry Hill Flats, I stated that a vacancy for a sub-post office was being advertised. I am now pleased to be able to let you know that a sub-post office will be opened in the Flats on September 3’.

Yorkshire Evening News, 30 August 1951

No Special Speed Limit For Quarry Hill Flats.

In a letter to Miss Bacon, the Minister, Mr. Alan Lennox-Boyd, says that in his opinion there is no need to lower the speed limit, writes the Y.E. News Political Correspondent.

No fatal accidents were caused by excessive speed and the only fatal accident during the last 12 months concerned a little girl who ran into the side of a lorry which was travelling slowly. The Minister says that nearly all the vehicles which drive into Quarry Hill Flats are trade vans, which rarely travel at speed.

Yorkshire Evening News, 3 June 1954 Children. Jacqueline Kerrigan, Gillian Mathers, Malcolm Kerrigan, Jayne Lofthouse (l to r)

Wright House from the south-west

72 . 73

Carnival 1952 Sylvia Mathers, Queen of the Flats

Quarry Hill Carnival – Eleven-year-old Queen.

The spirit of carnival was abroad in full last Saturday at Quarry Hill Flats, when the inhabitants of this unique self-contained town made the third annual Carnival a day to be stored in the precious book of happy memories for a long time to come.

Awaking to the promise of a very hot and sunny day the organisers knew that if the weather favoured them nothing could go wrong and indeed every item went off without a hitch in a way that spoke of much forethought and planning on the part of the Tenant’s Association.

One little girl who will recall the day as one of the highlights of her young life will be eleven-year-old Sheila Blackburn of Priestley House, the queen. Arrayed in her royal robes she looked as fine as any queen who ever graced a carnival, and the tenants were justly proud of their young monarch.

Carnival 1952

Quarry Hill Flats Tenants Association Carnival Day, 1948. The Youngsters Try Their Luck On The Revolving Horse

74 . 75 Queen Sheila attired in an Alice gown of white satin flounced with lace and a heavy purple cloak trailing behind her was escorted down the steps of the Social Centre by her three demure little page boys in white suits. Two maids-of-honour Sheila Hainsworth and Patricia Wilkinson looked delightful in picturesque dresses of white organdie embroidered in green, with mittens and headdresses in a toning shade.

The retiring queen Sheila Wolstenholme was present in her lovely finery of yester-year to grace the charming group with her dignified presence.

In gaily decorated vehicles the queen and her retinue were ridden in triumphal procession around the area encircling the flats. The fancy dress participants followed riding in state and grasped the opportunity to escort their queen with some resonant and very sincere cheering.

A more happy and carefree group of children could not have been found than these youngsters – at times hubbub and confusion reigned amongst them – and they loved it. Every second of every minute was enjoyed by them to the full as indeed it would have been difficult to do otherwise when the general air of expectancy and excitement one attributes to events of this kind pervades.

Everything spelled Carnival – the streamers, the children in their fancy “out of this world” dress, the crowds, the popular back-ground music and that atmosphere of bustle and preparation that retains an indescribable charm for each and everyone.

Suddenly the atmosphere changed and the anxious crowd were overjoyed to see the appearance of the popular Mr. Barney Colehan of “Have a Go” fame, to whom they gave a hearty welcome.

After the Baby Show, at which entrants were in the main fast asleep, and the fancy dress competition – an unenviable task for the judges – Mr. Colehan crowned the queen and presented the prizes.

Sports then took main place in the proceedings, and in the face of the hot sun the enthusiasts raced with a will that on beholding made most of the spectators limp.

In the eveing the Quarry Hill Flats Concert Party gave a very entertaining and spontaneous show to an appreciative audience. Talent spotting contests were also held.

The day ended on a very pleasing note, one that was reassured by the fact the Carnival was getting bigger and better every year.

Bonny Babies

Bonny Pageboys

Winners: Bonny Babies – for silver spoons and Cup. 12 months to 2 years old: James Outhwaite, 14 months, Neilson House.

Under 12 months: Peter Disley, 7 months, York House.

Fancy dress, for Carnival Trophy: 1, Louise Levy, Thoresby House (Gainsboro Lady), 2, Mildred and Molly Evans, Moynihan House, 3, Patricia Wood, Oastler House.

Talent Spotting Competition, 1, Mary Ansboro (Dancer), Oastler House, 2, Jean Swallow (singer), Neilson House, 3, Bob Roberts (singer), Jackson House.

Leeds Guardian, 29 July 1949

Wright House looking east from ‘the arena’

‘Miss Teen-age’. Miss sheila Ainsworth, aged 16, a cashier (far right)

76 . 77 House wives Voice. Mrs Pope, ?, Mrs Brooks, Mrs Green and Kaye Bailey

Quarry Hill Flats No ‘Dump’ – But No Apology.

Yorkshire Post, 24 April 1951

B.B.C. Men ‘Cannot Be Burnt-Offerings’. Northern chief answers Quarry Hill.

The Associaion has called a protest meeting for April 26, and Mr. Campbell, who produced this feature, was invited to attend and hear the tenants’ views on the broadcast.

But Mr. Stephenson has told Mr. Killingbeck: ‘If in all such cases the producers were subsequently to be cast as burnt-offerings to those who held dissentient opinions it would very quickly lead to an end of everything that we value in the way of free opinion and controversial comment’.

The letter says: ‘There is not a day on which the BBC does not broadcast at least one programme likely to impress some opinions favourably and others unfavourably. At one end of the scale it may be in such matters as the gags cracked at the expense of Cabinet Ministers and politicians in variety programmes. At the other end it may be a more serious project, such as one of the ‘Focus’ series, or a discussion on industrial or sociological affairs, or a dramatised survey such as the one now in question’.

Yorkshire Evening News, 14 April 1951

Oastler House from the north-east

78 . 79

Quarry Hill. View of Flats, New York Rd. (Crittal Manuf. Co.) Quarry Hill Flats Are Ideal For Atomic Heating Says – The Man From Harwell.

The man from Harwell – one of Britain’s atomic research centres – smiled. No doubt he had heard the question before. But even an atom man could not answer it.

My question was: ‘Will atomic power ever get rid of the domestic coal fire’? ‘I think’, he replied diplomatically, ‘that will remain a matter of personal choice’.

He had been showing me around the ‘Atoms for Peace’ exhibition – an Anglo-American enterprise contained in five huge trailers – which opened on Woodhouse Moor, Leeds, today.

But he did give me this concrete example. At the moment it seems it would be uneconomical ever to heat centrally detached and semi-detached houses with atomic power. On the other hand, the big block of flats – and he cited Quarry Hill Flats as being ideal – would fully justify the installation of plant for atomic central heating.

The next question – ‘Will Quarry Hill Flats endure long enough for that day to arrive?’ – he declined to speculate upon.

Yorkshire Evening News, 15 August 1955

Moynihan House from the north

80 . 81

Looking in through Neilson entrance

Human Bones Dug Up Near Quarry Hill Flats.

Called to Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, by workmen digging there, Leeds police collected human bones and what is believed to be part of a coffin. Under the gaze of interested flat-dwellers and little boys who crept as near as they were allowed to do, the police gathered up the bones in a sack and paper bags and took them away. No inquest on them will be held. It is assumed that an old burial ground was on the site where they were found – on the grass verge between Moynihan House and New York Road.

A Moynihan House dweller who saw the bones removed said: ‘Some of them were about 18 inches long. Where they were found is the original level of old Quarry Hill so far as I remember it’.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 12 August 1953

Main entrance, the Great Curve (Showing structural failure of neg.)

82 . 83

Direct from the outside world (Australia and the Leeds Empire). The Fabulous Miss Glamour travels to Quarry Hill to visit her greatest fan Joey Stonefield.

Earlier the Dargan and Tuke kids have their Whitsuntide 1956 photograph taken opposite J. Stonefield, M.P.S., Chemist, Telephone 22054. 1 Rhodes Parade, Quarry Hill, National Health Dispensing

Front of the laundry with shops under, looking west

84 . 85 Script pages 41/42 3 JOHNSON:

(narrating) And so our story reaches its final chapter.

4 GRAMS:

Harp arpeggio – “the page of scrapbook turns”

5 JOHNSON:

(narrating) The facts have been presented fairly and squarely. Little remains to be said. Perhaps thirteen years – years scarred by the ravages of a world war – is too little time for a decision to have been reached. Yet one thing is clear.

6

Quarry Hill faces its most testing hour. Whether a community such as finds itself now in Quarry Hill can ever adapt itself fully to what is, in many essentials, an un-English way of life, is something which has not yet been proved. And it is something which many of those in authority doubt. But unless it does, there is a danger already foreseen by some of those whose homes are a part of the experiment – a danger that for lack of those very provisions which were to have made community life possible, something of the squalor of the slums may eventually return.

7

And yet it is something to have attempted such a great experiment. No one dare deny that the material standard of life in Quarry Hill is as high as any yet provided for what are called “the lower income groups”. And the lessons learnt through thirteen years will find their justification in other blocks of flat dwellings that will one day rise in Leeds.

The Great Curve from the bus station

Quarry Hill Day, 6 March 1978. The flags read GOODBYE WORLD

8

You have the facts before you. Has the experiment succeeded? Does it point the way to other such experiments in the great cities of our land?

9

Ladies and gentlemen – we leave it to you!

(Fade in)

10 GRAMS:

Closing music on disc as arranged

11 CONTINUITY MANCHESTER:

You have been listening to QUARRY HILL EXPERIMENT. The case was presented to you by Noel Johnson, with the assistance of:

Joyce Adcock, Geoffrey Banks, Sebastian Cabot, Dora Cooper, Patricia Field, Tom Harrison, Randal Herley, Charles Lefaux, Martin Lewis, Joan Littlewood, Valerie Skardon, Herbert Smith, Norman Somers, and Edward Tilley.

The programme was illustrated by recordings made at Quarry Hill by the Northern Mobile Recording Unit.

QUARRY HILL EXPERIMENT was written and produced by Patrick Campbell.

86 . 87 Unattributed press photo of the murder flat ‘Jungle’ Article Infuriates Quarry Hill Tenants.

‘Anyone for the jungle?’ was the cry when a bus pulled up outside Quarry Hill Flats, in Leeds, yesterday. A few people self-consciously pushed their way off the bus.

‘The jungle of stone’ is what Quarry Hill Flats have been called in a newspaper article. There are few among the 3,500 residents who are not worried about it. Mrs. B. Kaye, of Oastler House, expressed the feelings of many present when she said to me: ‘It isn’t fair to our children. They will be ashamed of living here. And we are afraid that when they leave school and try for jobs, employers will look down their noses when they say they come from Quarry Hill Flats. Actually, it is a grand place to bring up children in, and I challenge anyone to find lovelier, healthier children anywhere than we have here.’

Yorkshire Post, 22 October 1953 Big CID Hunt After Murder At Quarry Hill Flats.

Police board buses, watch airports in search for woman’s slayer.

‘Killer may be dangerous if cornered’ warning.

Leeds police launched one of the biggest manhunts the city has known following the discovery of the body of 30-year-old Doris Allen of Bramley, in a bedroom at Moynihan House, Quarry Hill Flats, and a description was issued of a Pole who, the C.I.D. believe, might be able to help them in their enquiries.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 October 1953

Quarry Hill Flats? A Slum Where Mice Answer Back. Yorkshire Evening Post, 4 June 1953 Quarry Hill Storm: ‘This Insult Must Be Wiped Out’. Yorkshire Evening Post, 5 June 1953 ‘This Is No Slum,’ Says Quarry Hill Tenant. Yorkshire Evening Post, 8 June 1953 Woman Stabbed To Death in Quarry Hill Flats. Yorkshire Evening News, 6 October 1953 ‘Jungle Of Leeds’ Article Rouses Flat Dwellers. Yorkshire Post, 21 October 1953 A Leeds Protest To The Press Council. Yorkshire Post, 24 October 1953 They Defend The ‘Pic’.

In a letter to the Town Clerk of Leeds the Press Council states: ‘The opinion of your Committee that the comment was undesirable and unfounded is not shared by the members of the Council.’

Sunday Pictorial, 31 January 1954

Neilson House

88 . 89

Leeds Woman, Struck By Vehicle, Dies.

Mrs Helen Donnelly, aged 54 of Neilson House, Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, died today in Leeds Infirmary, where she was admitted after being struck by a motor vehicle in Lupton-avenue, off York-road, Leeds.

Yorkshire Post, 26 October 1950

Neilson House

90 . 91 The wedding of Patricia Dargan and John Andrews

The wedding of Amy Beaumont and Derick Jukes

The wedding of Doreen Beaumont and George Lupton Leeds Elects A Woman As Lord Mayor. Hope of ‘smokeless city’.

Ald. Mrs. Mary Pearce, nominee of the Socialist party, was today elected Lord Mayor of Leeds. She is the first member of the City Council to be so honoured.

Speaking of the Leeds she would like to see, she said first of all came a smokeless city that would open endless possibilities and which must be the dream of housewives.

‘I am looking forward to the time’, she went on ‘when Leeds can look bright and clean, when some of its lovely Portland stone can be brought back to its original colour, when paint on your houses can retain its freshness for a much longer time and the bright colours like the ones on the new Saxton Gardens flats can brighten a district without having to be repainted so often; when women don’t have to scrub the brick walls in our streets as often as they do; and with the help of the River Board and town planning, we can even have a pleasant river running under Leeds Bridge and a riverside walk with trees, especially willows, along side.

Perhaps you think this only a wild dream, but if the world could have some sort of sanity about life and not waste so much energy and money on destruction, these things would not be impossible.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 19 May 1958

Priestley House entrance

92 . 93

Jayne Lofthouse (in the aforementioned bathing costume)

Little Barry Beaumont

Bernard Dargan

Quarry Hill Day Nursery. May 1942 (Rephotographed 8/7/46) He Solves Their Problems At Quarry Hill.

Eighty feet below traffic was swirling dizzily round the island at the bottom of The Headrow. On either flank, dozens of chimney pots with ‘Long Tom’ extensions pointed skywards, like orderly rocket launchers.

Norman Loughton looked quizzically at the chimneys – some smoking, some not – and said: ‘So you would like to see one of the flats. Well I see Mrs Downend is in … let’s give her a call’.

That is how well the housing manager at Quarry Hills Flats, Leeds, knows the property in his charge. No need to go on a door-knocking expedition. All he had to do was select a chimney to see who was home!

Mrs Downend’s flat looks straight up The Headrow. The view is fascinating – were it London or Paris the rent would be in the stratosphere. Always something going on down there below her window – you are right in the middle of things yet, at the same time, strangely aloof and cut off. That perhaps, is the secret of living happily at Quarry Hill. Its tenants are on the city’s threshold yet, once they pass through the massive portals to the interior where the buildings curve away like photographs in an architects journal, they leave the city behind. For there is a city within a city.

And Norman Loughton is to them father, mother, guide, guardian, advisor, instructor, policeman, friend and home help. And he loves every minute of it.

Yorkshire Evening News, 21 November 1956

Oastler House from the inside

94 . 95

Moynihan and Jackson House playgrounds

Playground Havoc At Leeds Flats.

Quarry Hill Flats (Leeds) children may lose the facilities of their three playgrounds unless vandals methodically destroying sets of swings are detected.

Mr. A. Glynn, joiner at the Flats, said today: ‘That isn’t the work of children who are supposed to use the swings. It is the work of grown men or youths.’

A tenant said: ‘What we really want is a supervisor on the lines of a park ranger, whose full-time job it would be to patrol the flats and find the culprits.

The police can’t be here all the time.’

Yorkshire Evening News, 4 October 1951

Jane Dargan

Neilson House entrance from the north

96 . 97 April 1955

Daffodils For Quarry Hill Flats By Spring.

The grass slopes on one side of Leeds’ biggest landmark – Quarry Hill Flats – will next spring be a blaze of golden daffodils reminiscent of the annual daffodil display on the famous walls of York.

Leeds Corporation have planted several thousand daffodil bulbs in the turf of the Quarry Hill slopes fronting New York Road. The result should be a welcome and cheerful show for traffic entering the city by the main road.

Yorkshire Evening News, 19 November 1954

Vandals Destroy 7,500 Tulip Blooms.

Quarry Hill Flats residents who arrived at the shopping centre in The Gardens today found that what had been a scene of beauty for the last month had been replaced by a wilderness of destruction.

During the night 10 beds of tulips had been mutilated, and where 7,500 blooms grew yesterday no more than half-a-dozen remained. The heads of almost every flower had been neatly lopped off.

The tulips were overlooked by the day-nursery, the social centre and Sunday school, the estate offices and a parade of shops. It was a favourite resting place for older people and a playground for the children, who have always carefully avoided damage to the flowers.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 27 May 1957

Loose note with cutting from News Cutting Book From 13 November 1953, (No 3)

Thoresby House from the west

98 . 99 Quarry Hill Refuse Disposal Plant. 23 November 1939.

‘Steam Hall’, Leeds May Be Demolished, Once home of Matthew Murray.

One of Leeds’ historic houses – now forming Nos. 1 and 2, Holbeck Lodge, in Water Lane, Holbeck – which was built in 1804 for Matthew Murray, the famous Leeds engineer, is likely to be demolished. It has been represented by the Medical Officer of Health as unfit for human habitation. The house is said to have been the first steam-heated house in the world, and was known locally as ‘Steam Hall’. Councillor Harrison said the building was well-known to thousands of railway travellers – ‘it stands in a hollow within a triangle of railways just outside Leeds City Station, known to some as ‘the cabbage patch’.

Present occupiers are Mr. and Mrs Thomas Alfred Wakefield, and another family. Said 75-year-old Mr. Wakefield today: ‘This is the first I have heard about the move to demolish the house’.

Yorkshire Evening News, 4 December 1957

Steam Hall 2 with The Other Mr. Murray. C. Murray. Garchey Plant Eng. Q.H.F. 1953 June

Boiler House, Refuse Disposal Plant

1960s

Oastler House from the market, 1961

100 . 101

Quarry Hill Shock. £2m. repairs if flats are to last more than 10 years Are Quarry Hill Flats doomed? A shock announcement today by Coun.

Albert King, Socialist leader of Leeds City Council, suggests that unless £2,000,000 is spent on the flats their life may be OVER in 1971. Leeds Housing Committee will consider a report on Thursday by a local firm of consulting structural engineers which gives the opinion that the flats have given the life in keeping with their design. The remedial work under the 10-year plan will involve partial replacement of the outer surface facings, but rusting of the steel skeleton below ground level also must be tackled.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 18 July 1961

Wall slabs working proud of face, 1950s Flats Refacing Plan To Take Two Years.

The £343,000 repair scheme at Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds is expected to start in the middle of next month. ‘The work will go on continuously for two years’ an official told me yesterday. Councillor Cohen said that, subject to an elevation being prepared by the City Architect, thay had decided on contrasting buff and grey for the new facings.

Yorkshire Post, 20 October 1961

Quarry Hill Flats Will Still Be Here In 2000 A.D. : Coun. Cohen.

In a foreword to the annual report of the Committee, Coun. Cohen says a report by consultant engineers on the structure of the flats caused the Committee some concern. It was decided to start remedial work immediately, and was now being carried out by the local authority’s Director of Works in consultation with the engineers appointed by the Council.

Coun. Cohen adds: ‘Estimates as to the life of the flats vary, but there is no reason why a spirit of optimism should not prevail, and upon completion of the work there is every likelihood that Quarry Hill Flats will stand for more than the 60 years originally projected’. The flats were built in 1938.

Coun. Cohen said that if this estimate proved to be incorrect, then ‘those who are still around in 2,000 A.D. can call us liars’.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 18 January 1963

Oastler House

102 . 103

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Looking east across the roof of the Waste Disposal Block

Mrs Gladys Murray and daughter Christine Photographer’s dilemma 3: Candid shot or straight pose?

1970s

104 . 105

From the north-west. 24 September 1975 Tops For Tonight.

Diana Dors in Leeds? It seemed incredible. But it happened and you can see the proof in ‘Queenie’s Castle’ (YTV 9.0) tonight when she stars in a new series filmed in Quarry Hill Flats.

Leeds authors Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall have written a comedy situation series of six episodes centring around Queenie (Diana Dors) who is a powerful character in a sort of Coronation Flat set-up.

Tonight sees an attempt to get the ‘Queen’ evicted.

Yorkshire TV 9.0 ‘Queenie’s Castle (c): Diana Dors is the star of this new comedy series.

She plays Queenie Shepherd – a woman born to rule. In tonight’s episode ‘We Humbly Beseech’, arch-enemy Mrs Petty tries to get Queenie evicted from her kingdom – Buckingham Flats.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 5 November 1970

‘Berlin Wall’ Of Leeds Angers Tenants. They take a dim view …

Tenants in a section of Quarry Hill Flats, near Regent Street, Leeds are up in arms about a huge concrete wall, built about 20 ft from the flats, which is blocking their view. The wall which has already been nicknamed the ‘Berlin Wall’ is part of the Regent Street/New York Road flyover, but it has put the tenants on the warpath.

‘Why couldn’t the wall have been built further away from the flats’, demanded one woman. Mr. Bill Chapman (62) of Neilson House, Quarry Hill Flats, has had a view of grassy slopes and daffodils changed for a huge concrete support wall.

‘Apart from making the room dark it is what I imagine it would be like in a prison. I have a job to sleep now with the traffic, so what it will be like when the road is finished I shudder to think’.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 13 August 1968

The end of the Refuse Disposal plant

106 . 107

Jayne Lofthouse being sultry DEMOLITION OF QUARRY HILL FLATS 1. General It is proposed that the demolition should commence at Jackson House and proceed across the development in a westerly direction in the following sequence: a) b) c) d) e) f) g)

Jackson House Kitson House Lupton House Moynihan House Neilson House Wright House York House

h) i) j) k) l) m)

Victoria House Thoresby House Priestley House Savile House Oastler House Rhodes House

(see also drawing number PS/DEM/28/2) Each of the houses will be dealt with as a separate phase and will be boarded off with P.W.D. standard boarding in order that any nuisance to remaining tenants is kept to a minimum and the safety of children is maintained at all times. The one exception to the above general principle is Moynihan House which will be dealt with in two distinct parts in order that the pedestrian bridge over New York Road is kept open at all times (see drawing number PS/DEM/28/1 for details of the proposed temporary scheme and work involved).

Watchmen will be present on the site until 11.00 p.m. each day to prevent children from entering the demolition area and possibly injuring themselves. Arrangements will also be made for the police to supervise the site after this time.

Street lighting is to remain in operation throughout the duration of the works and all roads are to be kept open and cleared of any spillage (should any occur) at frequent intervals.

There will be no rubbish burned on site and generally every effort will be made to minimise the inevitable nuisance to remaining tenants.

2. Method of Working for a Typical Block Upon vacation of a dwelling unit all plumbing pipes and reclaimable materials will be removed and the dwelling made secure against trespass.

Once all the flats served by a common staircase are vacated, rising mains will be removed and the ground floor dwellings boarded up and the main entrance walled up with the canopy over removed to make all flats secure against itinerents and children. The Garchie and drainage systems will also be sealed as work proceeds.

When all the flats in a house are vacant the demolition process will proceed with the erection of the boarding around that house (it is proposed that there is always a ‘buffer’ of at least one staircase unit between tenanted property and the demolition works). Physical demolition will then proceed in a planned orderly manner. Each block will be scaffolded out if it is considered necessary for safety reasons.

The roof and uppermost storey cladding will be stripped down and taken off the site in skips. Then the top floor and lower storey cladding will be removed and so on until all external cladding and floors are taken down.

The steel frame will then be dismembered by the use of oxyacetaline burners or the like and mobile cranes.

Naturally in the interests of efficiency there will be overlapping of all the above activities, but it will be ensured that the works proceed in an orderly manner.

3. Pilot Schemes It is the considered opinion of the Officers of the Department of Public Works that a ‘dummy’ run would prove of great value in assessing the difficulties that may be encountered. This view is supported by the Officers of the Department of Housing and it is, therefore, proposed that such an exercise should be carried out on the first staircase unit on the site – Nos. 1-10 Jackson house. The method of carrying out the works as outlined above would be adopted and closely monitored at all stages.

It is considered that the average house could be demolished within 3 months of the last dwelling becoming vacant. However, after such a dummy run this could be fully assessed. It should be realised that the total duration of the demolition programme is not necessarily the sum of each of the houses because of the inevitable overlapping.

Department of Public Works.

C/PC/HAP/PR 20 February 1975

Victoria House looking east

108 . 109

Washing …

Quarry Hill Will Keep Its Laundry.

Good news for the 938 families in the famous Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds … they will not lose their laundry; it will probably be converted to a coinoperated laundrette. It will be modernised and given fresh amenities – and it will remain as a popular meeting place for the housewives of the estate.

Giving the news today about the laundry, Ald. Irwin Bellow, chairman of Leeds Corporation Housing and Property Management Committee said, ‘We want to retain the meeting place aspect of the laundry. This is important at Quarry Hill and tenants have been worried that they would lose this.’

The Committee this afternoon considered two possible alternatives: 1, Convert the laundry to a coin-operated laundrette under the control of the Corporation; 2, Lease the laundry premises to a private coin-operated laundrette firm, who would run it. ‘We want to look into the viability of both types of schemes’, said Ald. Bellow.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 6 January 1968 Laundry Plan Puts Wives In A Lather.

The housewives of Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds are in a fine old lather … all because of the City Council suggestion to make the laundry at the flats, coin-operated.

‘This is going to bump up our laundry bill tremendously’, one of the irate women, Mrs Edith Rockcliffe, of Neilson House, told me today. ‘We pay 9d extra on our rents for the use of the laundry. If this goes through it could well cost those with large families anything up to 15s or £1 if it’s coin-in-the-slot.’

Yorkshire Evening Post, 7 June 1968 800 Sign Laundry Petition. Yorkshire Evening Post, 14 June 1968

… and drying

… and demolishing

110 . 111 Joint Report of City Architect, City Development Officer, City Engineer, Chief Financial Officer and Director of Housing.

6.00 Summary The Committee are requested to consider the four options and indicate the policy selected.

6.01 Improve 780 flats, demolish the 154 flats to be affected by the future road proposals, and carry out a landscape and traffic management scheme at an estimated capital cost of £1,605,000.

First Prize awarded to Mrs W. Beaumont, 24 Moynihan House, by the Flowers For Leeds Committee, 1955 Season

Annie and Bill Beaumont

6.02

Improve 627 flats, demolish as in 6.01, plus Moynihan and Neilson Houses (flanking the inner ring road) and carry out a landscape and traffic management scheme at an estimated capital cost of £1,330,000.

6.03

Retain the “curved” wing of the complex comprising Oastler, Priestley, Saville and Rhodes Houses and improve the 312 flats and landscape the residue of the site at an estimated cost of £776, 000.

6.04

Demolish all the 934 dwellings and landscape the site prior to appropriation for Public Open Space or holding as a contingency site at an estimated capital cost of £295,000.

The question of redevelopment under the Housing Programme and the capital costs thereof has not been included. If this were to be the Committee’s instructions the revision to the Housing Programme Capital estimates should, it is suggested, be considered as a separate matter.

29 June 1972

York and Moynihan Houses from the south-east

112 . 113

Please Send Us Back To Belfast – It’s Safer.

An elderly Irish couple who have lived in Quarry Hill Flats, Leeds, for the past 27 years want to return to terror-stricken Belfast – for a bit of peace.

Mr. and Mrs. James Crozier say that they are living in constant fear of gangs of youths who are terrorising residents of the city centre estate. They claim youths have daubed the door of their Thoresby House Flat with paint and threatened to assault them.

Said 63-year-old Mr. Crozier: ‘My mother lives in Donegal Road, Belfast. She is safer there than we are’.

The Croziers are just one couple facing vandalism and hooliganism which has been rampant since Quarry Hill Flats began to be run down a few months ago.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 31 July 1974

First in, last out. Mrs Conway takes a last look across to Jackson House

Marjorie and Jayne Lofthouse wave across to York House Quarry Hill Fighters Say Farewell.

Quarry Hill Flats Tenants’ Association – once the biggest and most thriving tenants’ association in Leeds – is to be wound up at a meeting in the flats social centre on Tuesday.

According to a former official of the association the organisation has been dormant for five or six years after scares about defects in the structure of the flats which were once the biggest in Europe.

‘When the scaffolding went up round the flats, it was felt that the association had no scope to do anything,’ he said.

Many members of the association are unaware that the organisation has a substantial amount of money still in the bank, and distribution of the association’s assets will be top priority at Tuesday night’s meeting.

“There’s a three-figure sum in the bank,” said the ex-official.

“And apparently many of the flats’ tenants don’t know about the final meeting,” he added.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 20 June 1970

Oastler House

114 . 115

Jackson House, 1975

CLOSURE. With deep regret and circumstances above and beyond my control. I have no other alternative but to close down this shop from Mon. 24 May 76. All my old customers will be welcome at my new shop in Malvern Road, Beeston opposite the Malvern Public House 200 yds up the road from Shaftesbury House.

Office and workshop orders welcome. Tel 704523 to have order ready for collection. Thanks. Emmett’s fish and chip shop. Rhodes Parade.

Quarry Hill – Half Dream, Half Nightmare But Always In The News.

Quarry Hill flats will be pulled down by 1980 because of the cost of prolonging their life. Alison Ravetz, lecturer in architectural studies at Leeds Polytechnic, says some pioneers and activists ‘stubbornly remember and maintain that it was, and is, and could be something more successful’.

Yorkshire Evening Post, 20 June 1974 As Quarry Hill Bites The Dust, The Big Question Is … What’s In Store For Plum Site?

With the demolition of Quarry Hill Flats – once the pride of planners – under way a question mark hangs over the future of the plum 23-acre Leeds city central site. Coun. Miss Denise Atkinson, a Labour member of the Housing Committee said, ‘With 30,000 people on the council’s waiting list we obviously need more homes’.

Yorkshire Post, 24 September 1975

Waste Disposal Block looking east

FINALE

116 . 117

Town: Leeds

County: Yorks

No: A2637

Date: 1946

Oastler House from Neilson House

118 . 119

Spraying inside of mould. 24 December 1936

Entrance to Boiler House

The Last Arch of Quarry Hill from almost the end

120 . 121

Extract from a letter from John Killingbeck, Hon. Sec. Q.H.F.T.A., to Alison Ravetz, researcher. ‘ Letter writing is a time consuming task and although I enjoy it sometimes it becomes a little difficult to express exactly one’s thoughts on paper. May I suggest as your research proceeds I might meet members of the project to answer any specific questions which might arise from the point of my experiences. To me Quarry Hill was a wonderful experiment in space and time and I would dearly love to see a similar experiment on up-to-date lines’.

27 April 1969 Quarry Hill, Saville Restaurant. Dining Room. 31 July 1944

122 . 123

The model from the south-west

More Details Of New Leeds Estate. How Quarry Hill area will look. Bird’s eye perspective.

Architecturally, the modern horizontal treatment is to be followed, and on the estate considerable use is to be made of glass, the main feature being the swimming bath and the community hall, which are to be linked up with the large expanse of glass provided by the introduction of 20 shops. The medium for finishing the elevations has not yet been decided, as it will depend to some extent on the method of construction adopted, but it is proposed to emphasise the strong horizontality by means of a white or cream treatment, which will take the form of concrete or stucco, and further to emphasise the dark horizontal lines of the windows by linking up the windows with brick panels.

The design for the whole scheme has been carried out by the Housing Director (Mr. R.A.H. Livett, A.R.I.B.A.), and the perspective is the work of two architectural assistants in the Department.

Yorkshire Post, 9 January 1935

New models for old!! The West Yorkshire Playhouse, Quarry Hill from the north-east

West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds.

Can you afford to put aside 14p per day? We ask you to sacrifice one of the following:- 1lb of rabbit food, Two packets of Polos, 1½ sticky buns, 1 bag of wheat crunchies, 2 hrs 23 mins worth of electricity in TV watching, 3 stops on a number 14 bus, 1 plastic biro, 1 local telephone call, 7 slices of a sliced loaf, 2 centilitres of hotel red wine, 1 copy of ‘The Beano’, 15 dry roast peanuts.

Contributing the cost of any of these, an insignificant daily sum (convenanted over a four year basis) will assist us in building the last theatre of its kind in the UK. Appeal brochure to help finance the new theatre, 1989

124 . 125

September 21st 1944 I found this lady on a junk stall in Leeds Market as I was completing the design for this book. It looked like a whole family history had been tossed out and I bought two photographs – the other said ‘Taken June 1947. Age 78 years’. She looks so complete, everybody’s perfect granny, but no mention of her name. What better picture to wrap up the Quarry Hill story?

Quarry Hill Flats. No Entry 1978

126 . 127 BIG SCIENCE 6.14 Coo coo it’s cold outside. Coo coo it’s cold outside.

Ooo coo coo. Don’t forget your mittens.

Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here?

And he said: Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank.

Tou can’t miss it. And I said: This must be the place

Ooo coo coo. Golden cities. Golden towns.

Golden cities. Golden towns.

And long cars in long lines and great big signs and they all say. Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo.

Every man for himself. Ooo coo coo.

Golden cities. Golden towns. Thanks for the ride.

Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayhee.

You know, I think we should put some mountains here.

Otherwise, what are the characters going to fall off of?

And what about stairs? Yodellayheehoo. Ooo coo coo.

Here’s a man who lives a life of danger.

Everywhere he goes he stays – a stranger.

Howdy stranger. Mind if I smoke? And he said Every man, every man for himself.

Every man, every man for himself.

All in favor say aye.

Big Science. Hallelujah. Big Science. Yodellayheehoo.

Hey Professor! Could you turn out the lights?

Let’s roll the film.

Big Science. Hallelujah.

Every man, every man for himself.

Big Science. Hallelujah. Yodellayheehoo.

Laurie Anderson

128 . 129

Acknowledgements Many thanks to all the Quarry Hill people who so willingly helped me with this book. For their kindness, enthusiasm and generosity. Especially the late John Killingbeck who had the foresight to present his collection to the archives rather than the dustbin. And to the others, companies, pubs, undertakers and individuals who loaned me material and answered my telephone calls.

Thanks of a different order to Anne Heap (Local History Library), David Sheard (Library Photographic Services), Peter Brears (City Museum), Terry Friedman (City Art Gallery), The Thoresby Society, Alison Ravetz (Quarry Hill expert), Colin Taylor (Housing Advice Centre), BBC Television North (The Home Front team), Radio Leeds, St James’ Hospital (X-Ray Department), Mr Abbott (Birkinshaw Fire Fighting School), Kate Crowe (West Yorkshire Playhouse), Proctor Bros. (Wireworks) Ltd., York College of Arts & Technology (Photgraphic & Typographic Departments), Yorkshire Evening Post, Brian Lewis and J.R. Stuart White Esq. Thanks of a third kind to Bernard Crick, Smith Settle Publishers, The Arts Council

of Great Britain (Photographic Advisory Group), Impressions Gallery of Photography, York and Warren Jepson & Co. Ltd., 361 Burley Road, Leeds LS4 2SL who have processed and printed my work for almost 20 years and who have most generously helped finance this book.

Mr. and Mrs E.L. Mitchell when they were young. Catherine Elizabeth Rubel with De Havilland Puss Moth and Ernest Leslie with workmates. (front row, second right)

130 . 131 Photographic sources (top/middle/bottom/right/left) Architedtural Association, London 8, 20 (both Frank Yearby) Aerofilms Ltd., Boreham Wood 44, 16 Bournville Village Trust, Birmingham 59 Mrs E. Churchill, Leeds 18, 58 (b), 62, 70 (t & m), 82 (br), 90 (tl), 92 (t3), 94 (br) Alan Cockroft, Leeds 5 Mrs Conway, Leeds 112 (t) Mr A.E. Hewitt, Leeds 46 (b2) Housing Advice Centre, Leeds 22, 30 (b), 36, 96, 102, 108 Jack Hulme, New Fryston 80, 84 Central Library Local History Section, Leeds 4, 14 (b), 26, 28, 32 (t), 39, 40, 48 (b), 52, 58 (tr), 60 (r), 72 (Killingbeck File t), 73 (Killingbeck File), 78, 86, 88, 94 (bl), 98 (t), 120 (br), 122 David Livett, Leeds 20 (b), 24 (t), 32 (m), 46 (t), 66/67 (panorama) Charles and Marjorie Lofthouse, Leeds 54, 70 (b), 72 (b), 76, 106, 112 (b) Jim Low, Norwich 114 (bl) Mr C.B. Murray, Leeds 14 (t), 98 (b), 103 Mrs J.A. Outhwaite, Leeds 56, 74, 75, 90 (tr & b2), 92 (bl), 110 (t & m), 120 (t6) Tommy Outhwaite, Bradford 110 (b) Alison Ravetz, Leeds 9, 11, 27 (r), 42 (t), 94 (t), 100 (b), 114 (t) Royal Commission on the Historical Monuments of England, London 27 (l), 34 (l4), 38 (John Summerson t), 92 (br), 100 (t), 118 Mr J. Stonefield, Leeds 82 (t2 & bl) The Thoresby Society, Leeds 48 (Alf Mattison t), 64 West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds 123 Wood Visual Communications, Bradford 50, 68 Mr J.R. Stuart White, Leeds 24 (b), 30 (t), 32 (r), 34/35 (panorama) Yorkshire Post Newspapers Ltd., Leeds 15, 16, 21, 104 All other photographs Peter Mitchell Big Science (Laurie Anderson) is copyright Warner Chappell Music Ltd. and used by kind permission of Warner Chappell Music Ltd.

Afterword

The White Citadel Part of the decoration in Morrisons supermarket in the Merrion Centre is an aerial photograph, flying east, of The Headrow. The picture is crammed with detail of Leeds city centre but is hardly noticeable because everything is covered in soot – the natural colour of Leeds. Your eye is instantaneously drawn to a large white blob top centre which on closer inspection reveals a building under construction. It looks odd and out of place. It doesn’t snuggle up against any adjacent buildings but sits in its own vast space, almost a launch pad. It’s not square but sinuous and curved – a broad bow aimed up The Headrow or conversely The Headrow providing a triumphant causeway and entry into the Great Curve. So it’s new, it dazzles and it is special. It is The City Within A City,The New Jerusalem,The Stone Jungle,The Great Social Experiment,The New Model Estate,The Red Ruin, Queenie’s Castle. It is Quarry Hill Flats in the making circa 1937, of a size and individuality unique to this country. And it’s in Leeds!

I have a handbill of that spot where construction is underway entitled Quarry Hill and the Famous City of Mab Races, Monday August 29th 1836 (besides horse racing a spa was available and also bear-baiting) but by 1900 it had become Quarry Hill Insanitary Area and the steep lane of Quarry Hill dug out to become New York Road. Insanitary Areas were all over Leeds, a legacy of the Industrial Revolution, and places to be feared, cholera and typhoid being frequent visitors.

When I arrived in Leeds in the early seventies clearances seemed to be in progress over the entire city. The former Quarry Hill Insanitary Area (aka slums) was again being demolished like rats nibbling their way through a stranded whale and I photographed over five years the demise of the flats. Nobody else bothered. I thought people might be afraid of the flats and making a gesture of publically shunning the site. I knew nothing of the history at that time but the sheer size, the style ‘along continental lines’, the atmosphere of such a fortress, the how-on-earth-didthis-estate-happen made for a determination to see this structure out. Literally!

Flick through any book on architectural history and under ‘Modernism’ you won’t find Quarry Hill but of course the usual heroes leap out – machines for living in, less is more, penguin pools, lots of glass etc etc. R.A.H. Livett never gets a look-in (or his whole name printed) and as the architect and a young first Director of Leeds Housing it’s a pity that he never left any memoirs of his time because Quarry Hill was his weird one-off and the rest of his career seems to be the conventional council estates that surround the city. A real history of the flats can be read in Alison Ravetz’s ‘Model Estate’ (published in 1974 and ironically coinciding with the vanishing of the flats) and by the time I had an exhibition of my work twelve years later in Leeds City Art Gallery the estate had been all but forgotten. ‘Memento Mori’ became my own take on the flats and it wasn’t easy. So many obvious archives had nothing. The well-remembered press cuttings volumes and the photo albums of the stage-by-stage construction (and bound in red and black leather) all lost. Where did the priceless archive of Leeds’ most famous photographic company ‘Pickards of Leeds’ go? Weren’t there any contemporary artists, painters, film makers,

134 . 135

designers who made their own work or records around the estate? Didn’t anybody in the Leeds camera clubs do something over the years under their regualr categories of architecture, portraits, beauty, experimental etc? Apparently none! They didn’t even have to think up captions – stuff like ‘Beachy Head at Sunset’ was always in the newspapers for Christ’s sake! Leeds Central Library Local History has the best indicators and that’s mainly the donation of one man.

I salute you Mr. John Killingbeck, an ex-Quarry Hill flat-dweller who truly believed in the estate to the very end.

The Microbes of Time gnaw away the innards, another war comes and goes, life gets hard and the novelty wears off. Attitudes change and what is one man’s utopia becomes another man’s slums. Rubbish piles up and out-of-town commuter’s cars block the roads and play areas. In recent times I remember Concorde flying over Quarry Hill and Chapeltown – a spectacular aircraft built as an Anglo-French project with a far from smooth production history. And not a million miles from Quarry Hill Flats with its French Mopin Construction method, its lifts and Garchy waste disposal system inspired by the tower blocks at Drancy on the outskirts of Paris and the French workers brought over to Leeds to initiate the Leeds bricklayers into the mysteries of pre-cast concrete manufacture. Needless to say the French and the Yorkshiremen were bewildered by each other. Both the flats and Concorde had the same colour and lifespan and embodied visionary ideals about making life better and both underestimated just how messy and unpredictable people are.

Towards the end I spent a day within The White Citadel jotting thoughts amongst the waist-high grass and rosebay willow herb. The demolition was between contracts so it was silent save for the odd jet flying high over the giant circle. Near Victoria House a white gypsy horse eyed me expectantly. Actually the only white around; all else grey and rust. There was no outcry to save the estate or get it listed, no hare-brained scheme to turn it into something dramatic, crazy or desperately needed. From the city that was still building back-to-backs in 1937 when the likes of Liverpool and Manchester had outlawed that house-type in the 19th Century – total indifference. Nobody knew what to do with the flats (demolition always a good counter to indecision) or what to put in their place. No city pride here; a big problem looming. Things fall apart for a myriad of reasons and one of the strongest was the early arrival of the end of the 20th Century. The heart of Quarry Hill had shrunk and new idioms were rolling in – not yet defined or understood – but preparing to land. Leeds and the rest of the UK were morphing into something quick and different with no place for a block of council flats in a metropolitan city centre. How odd (and how Leeds) that that silly little Georgian-style petrol station (now accompanied by a sculptural tribute to aviation) contemporary with the flats at the bottom of The Headrow should outlast the mighty Quarry Hill Experiment. And deep down I hope it outlives the nearby John Lewis department store.

‘Experiment’ was used a lot by the media of the day which implies a success or failure result and a big theory under test. The flats were built to house tenants, initially from slum clearances which upset landlords, and this the flats did for over 3,000 people in comprehensively designed apartments according to their needs. The landlords drove around Leeds showing posters crying RED RUIN. ‘Community’ not ‘Socialism’ was the buzzword and a glance at the photographs of the annual Quarry Hill Flats Grand Carnival show tenants having fun, trying their luck on the revolving horse and electing ‘Miss Teenager of the Flats’.

Now in the second decade of the 21st Century we are all lost. The railway bridge across Burley Road used to sport the graffito ‘Neither Work Nor Leisure’ (the prophet never signed it) and so it came to pass. An outbreak of giant gnomes all over Leeds (gnome sweet home – getit) as the publicity come-on for the launch of ‘Saxton’, council flats a stone’s throw from where Quarry Hill used to be, now being converted by the groovy developer ‘Urban Splash’ for private tenants (150 year leases) with the gimmick of a small allotment and mini-shed thrown in for those that still had the word ‘garden’ in their consciousness. There was no eager queue buying off-plan and I downed several glasses of champagne before snapping the sales tent and leaving empty-handed. Hard not to think of Roxy Music’s ‘in every dream home a heartache’. Caveat Emptor!

Thursday 13th May 2010. I’m standing on the hill that once supported the New Model Estate trying to decide whether I really rated the flats or not. The world’s biggest dole office rears up behind me with its computers and menacing rooftop spike and an uncanny echo of the Quarry Hill style, the College of Music and the BBC are to my left and in front is The West Yorkshire Playhouse with the bus station beyond and an empty tower block with the usual moniker (in this case Skyline) stuck in the middle. To my right the initial death knell of the flats nicknamed The Berlin Wall and officially the inner ring road A64 (motorway) is as busy as ever. The site is stuck and unfinished and the scant landscaping is dreary and uncared for and the phrase ‘failure of the imagination’ leaps to mind. Originally the ‘unique self-contained town’ was surrounded by three feet art-deco owls all along the roofline. The Civic Hall, built contemporary with the flats, still keeps its golden owls but those from the Quarry Hill flew away well before my time. I can’t easily picture the flats anymore, yet I feel a sad sense of loss. How stupid is that? I walk on a bit and notice a typewritten sheet of paper on the kerb and bend down to pick it up. But I can’t because it’s glued down deliberately next to a drain. Gently I lever it off the kerb so as not to tear it, sit down over on the steps (skateboarders prosecuted), take a glance up the length of The Headrow now also facing demolition and study the handbill.

136 . END

Richard Oastler 1789 to 1861. A campaigner and social reformer of national repute who at one time lived on Quarry Hill and had the Great Curve named in his honour. He would have taken note of that handbill.

Yeah – once it was there but now it’s gone.

Don’t get over it.

Peter Mitchell March 2016