A fascinating but little known film made in 1968 by John Betjeman about the architecture of Leeds has been digitised and put online
Film
A poet goes north
http://www.bbc.co.uk/insideout/
Twenty years ago, a forgotten film by the former poet laureate John Betjeman turned up in a store cupboard at Leeds Civic Trust. In 1968, the newly created society had provided a subsidy of 200 guineas to tempt both the BBC and Betjeman up to Leeds to make a 30-minute film about the city’s architecture. The film was never broadcast, but with the help of the Yorkshire Film Archive it has just been digitised and can be seen at last online.
Betjeman liked the city. Delivered in his inimitable style, his views resonate today. “Skyline seems always to have mattered in Leeds,” he observes, “it’s very human and individualistic, and will continue to be so, provided it isn’t spoilt by the now old-fashioned idea of building huge slabs in the sky out of scale with everything around them.” The camera pans across the ugly new concrete office blocks darkening the sky: “money-getting machines in a battle of the cubes, built to get as much money out of the ground as possible.”
Amid the tall buildings orgy of the past decade, it is almost forgotten that by the late 1980s Leeds City Council had come to agree with Betjeman and talked of replacing high rises with buildings of a quality, massing and palette of materials that would restore the traditional skyline.
Moving on, the poet, sitting on the doorstep of a boarded-up inner city back-to-back house, laments their wholesale clearance. Though lacking gardens or even front yards, he thought they created a sort of “village life of the street”. In contrast, the council’s “new town” at Seacroft, a hard-edged, high-rise and soulless environment, clearly appalled him. “It’s all done with the very best of intentions, but wouldn’t you feel a bit lonely living in one of those flats, and look back with regret to the old days you had in the back-to-backs with the communal life, the corner shop, and the cobbled street? Here, it’s rather like compulsory shopping, compulsory pleasure, compulsory leisure, compulsory art.”
Today, the city’s 21,000 remaining back-to-backs are viewed as an important asset, capable of providing comfortable homes, while the council estates remain problem environments.
Two of the architectural stars of his tour were Holbeck’s grade I Egyptian-style Temple Mill and Spenfield, the sumptuous villa designed by George Corson in the 1870s. Ironically, both are under serious threat today: the mill’s remarkable 0.8ha roof, on which sheep once grazed, partly collapsed last year, while Spenfield faces subdivision into apartments.
But Betjeman would return to Leeds today with considerable pleasure, some of the high-rise buildings not withstanding. The soot has gone, the derelict waterfront has been amazingly transformed, and the city’s splendid Victorian, Edwardian and even Georgian buildings have been cleaned and repolished, and sit well with the new. As Betjeman enthused, “the city is so full of individuality and interest that it is difficult to know where to start”.
Original print headline - Laureates for Leeds
Postscript :
Kevin Grady is director of Leeds Civic Trust.
Source - BD Online
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