Leeds

ARGH @£$$(_@ I haven’t written a blog post yet.  And it’s 9pm.  I’m getting worse at this.  Luckily the city I was going to write about is Leeds, so I have time to come up with something.  And luckily I didn’t have many pictures to put in.  But be warned that this post will not be remotely researched, so will be almost entirely personal anecdote.  I hope you like random facts from my childhood.

Date of trip: Sunday 23rd September 2018
Journey time: approx. 3h20 (change at Birmingham New Street)
Fare: £68.65 (Off-Peak return, with 16–25 Railcard)

Let’s start with the Corn Exchange.  This used to be an alternative shopping centre that I never went in (well, obviously, it was originally a corn exchange).  By “alternative”, I guess I mean “goth”, although I’m waiting for any readers who also grew up near Leeds and actually went there to pull me up on that and tell me which subculture it actually was.  Anyway, you will be shocked to learn after that that I didn’t go much, and was quite excited when they turned it into a food shopping centre—which failed, and they had to let some of the alternative shops that they’d kicked out back in.  It’s now a bit of an odd mix of hipster and genuinely cool.

Leeds actually has a lot of shopping centres: counting the CornEx, I think there are seven, plus at least five arcades, mostly Victorian.  One of them, Trinity Leeds, is the “main” centre, and this summer had an animatronic T-rex for no obvious reason.  Another, The Core, I remember as having the best toy shop in Leeds in it, and a food court that you got to up a really long and thin escalator.  But they kicked most of the shops out, and then couldn’t fill it (sound familiar?), in this case because it was going for the “upmarket” market that all went into Trinity Leeds when that opened six months after The Core was finished.¹

The problem with writing about Leeds, in fact, is that its main selling point to visitors from outside Yorkshire is that it has beautiful shopping arcades.  (It’s also apparently the financial capital of the north.)  I agree that it has great shops, but I tend to go into chain stores, so I don’t have anything hugely interesting to say.  (If you want me to start a fashion blog, I can try; I promise the result would be bad, and not even in a funny way.)

Leeds does also have the Royal Armouries Museum.  I didn’t go on my most recent trip, but as a kid I used to enjoy their crossbow shooting gallery, which I’m not sure is there any more (they also had a thing where you could shoot laser guns.  I’m not sure what the educational value of this was).  There was also a very fancy high-tech thing where you could choose different tactics in a battle and see what happened.³

The problem with the Royal Armouries is it’s far out of the main bit of the city centre.  The Art Gallery is in the centre, as is the City Museum—that has a hall with a giant map of Leeds on the floor, which I remember being impressed with when the museum opened ten years ago, when I was ostensibly a moody teenager who should not have been impressed with a giant map of Leeds.  There’s also a badger, and so one of the friends I visited with recently took a picture of me posing with the badger because I’m a Hufflepuff (no, you can’t see it).

The City Museum is opposite Millennium Square, which has a small garden dedicated to Nelson Mandela.  The story goes that when the great man visited to re-open it (it was first opened when he was in prison), he thanked the people of Liverpool for this great honour.  The other major square in Leeds is City Square, with an inexplicable statue of Edward the Black Prince, who had no obvious connections to Leeds, but who was dressed up in a yellow jersey for when the Tour de France passed through the city.  City Square also has a newly-installed sculpture of some feet, which is almost as inexplicable (the sculptor came from Leeds, at least).

Of course, I couldn’t write this without writing about the station, which was rebuilt when I was a child (c. 2001, I think, so I’d be about seven).  I remember being fascinated by the process, and every time we went into Leeds I collected one of the newsletters that they gave out explaining what they were doing.  To my mum’s dismay, I still have most of them in a folder somewhere.

Right, so actual travel advice.  The problem is that Leeds is a long way from Oxford, and there are no direct trains: there have been over the summer because of engineering works at Derby, but that’s stopping this weekend.  It’s also expensive, and there’s not a huge amount that’s worth travelling miles for.  To be honest, I wouldn’t have ever written about it if I hadn’t ended up unexpectedly out of Oxford and had to scrabble around for blog posts.

But there are a lot of things to see and do in West Yorkshire, some of which you really can only see and do in West Yorkshire, as I’ve written about before, so Leeds is a decent place to use as a base to explore the rest of the county.  Maybe see you there one day.

 

¹ Or so I thought.  Turns out the really upmarket shops hadn’t arrived yet; they’d turn up in Victoria Gate when that opened, next to the biggest John Lewis² outside London.

² I refuse to call it “John Lewis & Partners” because that’s a stupid name.

³ I mean, it seemed very fancy and high-tech at the time.  Now it would get the same reaction as the audience gave when, in a recent screening of Jurassic Park I went to, the kid excitedly said, “It’s an interactive CD-ROM!  Look!”