Pride, even boastfulness emanates from Brodrick’s designs, they are meant to impose, not just from the outside but also internally, with their sweeping balconies, balustrades and banisters.
Eddie Lawler
In my lifetime, the skyline of Leeds acquired huge boxes of varying height from squat to dizzy. But to me Leeds is Leeds because of three buildings which put the boxes to shame – the Town Hall, the Mechanics Institute and the Corn Exchange, each unique, all the work of Hull-born architect Cuthbert Brodrick.
When I first came to work in Leeds, these three buildings were the sootiest black, decorated with white spots contributed by roosting starlings. All have been cleaned and renovated, the Institute transformed first to Civic Theatre and then to City Museum; and the Corn Exchange with its incomparable egg-shaped dome has morphed from an auction market to an Aladdin’s Cave of independent retailers.
Pride, even boastfulness emanates from Brodrick’s designs, they are meant to impose, not just from the outside but also internally, with their sweeping balconies, balustrades and banisters. His work is celebrated in Jonathan Meades’ documentary “The Vanishing Architect” viewable online.
But this chap hasn’t vanished from my awareness in the slightest, because we’ve retired to Scarborough, dominated by a monster called the Grand Hotel. For a while one of the largest of its kind in the world, Brodrick combines an almost outrageous Victorian grandeur with towers referencing France, where he studied for a while. When the winter wind charges in from the North, it is funnelled into the force of the “Grand Canyon” which blows hats off, but somehow matches the force of this immovable object.
These days I volunteer as a guide to the Pre-Raphaelite delights of St Martin’s-on-the-Hill church – which I discover is a commission Brodrick failed to get. It went to another fellow from Hull, George Frederick Bodley, who went on to build well over 100 churches worldwide. Brodrick entered a neo-Gothic design which never went beyond the drawing-board.
The only church Brodrick did complete is back in Leeds, the Congregational Church on Headingley Lane – which is undergoing a transformation into secular duties as flats. At least the impressive shell remains, unlike Brodrick’s King Street Warehouses, and his Oriental Baths on Cookridge Street, both victims of 20th century “progress”. See the Baths on Google Images – and be impressed.
Leeds finally honours Brodrick with a Wetherspoon’s establishment overlooking Millenium Square. Cheers, Cuthbert!