Leeds Central Library

I made a trip to Leeds recently to meet a friend and we decided to visit Leeds Art Gallery. It is adjacent to the main public library, the Leeds Central Library (above right), so we popped in for a coffee in The Tiled Hall, which serves both facilities. The library building from the outside looks fairly 'Victorian municipal' and indeed it was built around 1880 to serve, alongside the Town Hall (on the left above), as municipal offices and a library.  (By the way, the crowd of people outside were absorbed in playing chess on giant tiled boards.)

The Tiled Hall was the library's Reading Room: a huge, wonderfully vaulted space with columns, beautiful tiles and a lovely parquet floor. It has been fully restored to its original splendour in recent years, having over the years been altered and covered up. 

Elsewhere in the library there are fabulous decorative effects, like the terracotta tiled columns in the original lending library:

It has lovely stained glass windows:

Everywhere there are examples of decorative ceramic tiles and mosaics. It's a real feast for the eyes.

It seems that even in days gone by people were wont to leave their mark... Parts of the stonework have been scored by graffiti, some of it going back almost to the earliest days of the building, as shown by the date of 1893.