Building Leeds

Wherever you look in Leeds there is building work going on, with numerous cranes along the skyline. It's the sign of a city that is prospering, I suppose. Our camera club outing was exploring the area behind the station and along the Leeds-Liverpool Canal as it winds its way to its terminus in the city centre dock area. It is a fascinating mix of old canalside warehouses, factories and mills with a huge amount of relatively recent construction too - offices and residential blocks. The canal forms a greenway through the urban sprawl. 

There has been some effort to preserve features of the older, more industrial past. This rather ornate Italianate tower (below), built in 1866 and modelled on the Torre dei Lamberti in Verona, was a dust extractor for the Tower Works, operational from 1864 until 1981, which made steel pins for carding and combing in the textile industry. It's now dwarfed by the surrounding new office blocks built as part of the regeneration of the Holbeck Urban Village area. 

Bridgewater Place (below), an office and residential skyscraper that was completed in 2007, was the tallest building in Yorkshire at that time though now superseded by a block of student flats. It has been dogged by problems as it creates a 'wind microclimate' around it. A local man was killed in 2011 when a lorry, buffeted by the wind, overturned on him. Baffles have had to be constructed around the structure's base to mitigate the dangerous wind speeds and models for new skyscrapers in Leeds are now subjected to enhanced tests in wind tunnels.