Slums of the future?
More than one in 10 of the city centre apartments in Leeds is standing empty… and nearly 400 apartments have been unoccupied for more than 12 months. Concern about building in the city was expressed in 2006 by the architect Maxwell Hutchinson.
Maxwell Hutchinson writes…
"I hate to say I told you so but, two years ago, I said property prices in Leeds were heading for a fall.
"My views ruffled a few feathers, but I still know I was right.
"There was talk of 20,000 new city centre apartments. The tower blocks were getting bigger, and Leeds was about to be transformed.
"But now apartments aren’t just dropping in value – many aren’t even lived in.
"At Clarence Dock, they don’t go in for schools or churches – but there’s a shiny new casino. There’s only one small supermarket but, if you want to eat out, there’s plenty of choice.
"We’ve built communities without roots in meaningless glass boxes.
"As times get tougher, some flats will become slums – or get demolished."
The reaction
The Leader of Leeds City Council, Andrew Carter, disagrees and says Hutchinson’s attacks are "a gross overstatement".
He says: "We have not built any slums and neither have the private developers."
But Councillor Carter did see some potential good coming out of the present situation:
"One thing that will change and probably for the better is that we will see different types of developments in four or five years' time."
And Simon Kidd, Commercial Lettings Director at Clarence Dock, defends the development:
"Clarence Dock is still a work in progress.
"With the demand from workers comes the need for shops that sell sandwiches, possibly a pharmacy, a gym, all those things that become an integral part of the community - but they're not the first uses to appear on site.
"Those come once you've created the community."
However, Hutchinson does have some support - architect Irena Bauman agrees that Leeds may have missed an opportunity.
She says: "We built too quickly.
"We didn’t have a plan in place to actually take advantage of this extraordinary boom that we just had.
"We could have done so much with it but instead we just built a lot of very similar types of buildings."
Source: BBC INSIDE OUT
Share This Story..