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Having taken a pot shot at the council, it is only fair to say that Holbeck is an excellent example of the public and private sectors working together. Indeed, Leeds City Council is perceived as an ‘enabling’ council by many developers wishing to invest in the city. Mark Jackson, chief executive of Reland, part of the Gladedale Group which has bought two huge disused chemical sites in the city, believes this is Leeds’s key ingredient. ‘Leeds has a culture of delivery which goes some way to providing the clarity and certainty that developers and businesses need.’
Up to a point, Lord Copper. While the council is helping to facilitate new developments across the city (the number of cranes on the skyline underlines its success), there are major problems elsewhere. The overall marketing of the city is a shambles: minor celebs such as Chris Moyles and Gabby Logan, who were brought up in Leeds but moved away, turned up at an over-hyped launch before disappearing back to London. After the launch it transpired that the dreadful marketing slogan ‘Leeds Live It, Love It’, which cost thousands of pounds to dream up, had actually been ‘borrowed’ from Hong Kong. People sniggered. Heads rolled.
Then there is the continuing saga of the lack of a major concert arena, which seriously undermines Leeds’s claim to be Britain’s second city. We all got terribly excited last month when The Who returned to play at the venue of their celebrated Live At Leeds album. But this wasn’t some massive stadium, it was the university refectory. Newcastle, Sheffield and Manchester all have purpose-built concert stadia, so why not Leeds? Much bluster from the council, much rustling of consultants’ reports, but answer comes there none.
There is one purpose-built stadium in Leeds, of course, but that houses Leeds United, one of the most unpopular football teams in the history of the beautiful game. This unpopularity stems largely from the cynical, joyless tactics practised in the Don Revie years, not helped by the hubris which followed the team’s one and only Premiership title and the trial five years ago of two Leeds players for an alleged attack on Asian youths outside the Majestyk nightclub in the city centre. The fans remain remarkably loyal and turned up in their thousands to cheer their heroes at Cardiff in the Championship play-off final this May. But the team might as well have stayed at home, so badly did they play.
It is striking that none of Leeds’s new money has come to the aid of its struggling football team. It was left to the abrasive ex-Chelsea boss Ken Bates to save the club from bankruptcy. The proud owners of this new money are much too wise to invest heavily in such a capricious business. Millionaires such as David Hood, co-founder of Pace Micro Technology, the internet entrepreneur Peter Wilkinson, and Paul Sykes, the property tycoon and anti-euro campaigner, have seen how easily old Leeds money was frittered away as families plunged from riches to obscurity in the blink of a feckless generation. Symbolically, the old Leeds Club, where ‘business’ was conducted over a snifter or six, is now an apartment block.
So what does the future hold? There is no doubt, leaving aside the lack of a concert arena, that the city’s retail and leisure facilities have improved immeasurably in the past 20 years. An exciting night out in my youth amounted to little more than a flutter at the casino in the drab Dragonara Hotel and a bop to Showaddywaddy at the Queen’s Hall. Today Leeds is the new Knightsbridge, with Harvey Nichols at its epicentre and a John Lewis store in the pipeline. Meanwhile the historic Grand Theatre, closed for 14 months, is to reopen this autumn after a £31.5 million refurbishment. It will provide a permanent home for the excellent Opera North and, together with the West Yorkshire Playhouse, is a rebuttal to wags who suggest that Leeds needed a sharp kick up the arts. Smart new office and residential developments are also being built across the city centre and (just) beyond.
Mike Dove of property consultants Knight Frank believes that Leeds ‘is a can-do city with a clear identity. …It has the potential to be the finest city in the north of England by a distance.’ There remain, however, what a recent government report called ‘doughnuts of deprivation’ in Leeds’s hinterland. Areas such as the Yorkshire Ripper territory of Chapeltown and Harehills, and Beeston, where two of the 7 July bombers came from, are a million miles from Harvey Nichols. But then so was Holbeck — and look at it now.
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