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City needs room to breathe
IT has been heartening to see from Briggate and Boar Lane recently, that the squalid toilet tiles of the awful former Trinity Arcade and the blank brick monolith of the former C&A store have been swept away.
A sense of space has been created, albeit temporarily, around the generally disregarded yet elegant early 18th century Hawsmoor-esque Holy Trinity Church. Unfortunately, the tiled 60s monstrosity which is Top Shop still remains and looks set to continue to blight the lower middle stretch of Briggate.
A new mall, Trinity Quarter, is to replace the unlamented arcade but it does compel one to ask, do we need yet another covered shopping centre when one considerably larger is projected as part of the scheme for the north of Eastgate?
Seeing Holy Trinity Church released from the oppressive huddle of atrocious architecture that surrounded it and given room to breathe, I am given to speculate that instead of the glass-canopied and sided retail centre planned, would it not have been better to have created a public square or small park on this site, with grass, trees and flowers in it and some sensitively, carefully designed buildings in harmony with the history of the district flanking parts of the north and west sides with, of course, such a building replacing the ugly Top Shop.
Imagine on a warm spring or summer day being able to view the church from a park bench on the north side, under one of numerous trees, across a grassy arboreal space. It would provide a much-needed green lunch and public space for this part of the city centre and open up the bottom of Briggate and north of Boar Lane, not to mention a direct thoroughfare and viewpoint up a re-opened Trinity Street to Land's Lane and the Headrow. Perhaps even The Peel pub could be incorporated at the corner of Boar Lane and a new Trinity Square.
Unfortunately, this being Leeds, any available city centre land must, it seems by divine decree, be built upon by enclosed collections of retail outlets, which with their depressingly familiar high street chain names and ubiquitous architecture, increasingly make our city centre more indistinguishable from others in the UK.
For an example of how a Leeds Trinity Square could look, go to Birmingham city centre between Colmorehow and Temple Row and sit in the sylvan green area around the 18th century St Philip's Cathedral, which has the advantage of being both open and modestly expansive, unlike the pocket sized green around St John's Church between New Briggate and Merrion Street in Leeds, for which, at least I suppose, we should be grateful.
Dan Laythorpe, Little Woodhouse, Leeds
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Weather for Leeds
Thursday 24 May 2012
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