Leeds nostalgia: The changing face of school

While the world is becoming increasingly ‘digital’ and an increasing number of services moving online, these two pictures show a world in which, if you were to be caught walking down the street talking to yourself, you’d probably be locked up.

The first image shows members of the Yorkshire Post and Yorkshire Evening Post editorial teams working by candlelight and paraffin lamps, presumably because of a power cut. Nothing stopped them in those days, it seems.

The second image shows the voluminous newsroom with its grand ceiling some 50ft or so above the floor. For forty years, this was the nerve centre of the Yorkshire news gathering operation and judging by the picture, every desk was taken.

Of course, as happened with other industries, new technologies brought the chance to make savings and that, inevitably, meant job cuts.

When it had opened in the 1970s, its owners predicted it would be a building which would last a hundred years. They had moved out of the cramped Albion Street offices and so the new building must have seemed like something from the future. At its height, some 1,500 people worked at the Wellington Street building, which was a warren of corridors and rooms within rooms.

By the time the old building was abandoned in 2014, the editorial floor was sparsely occupied. Indeed, the bulk of the building, with all its five floors, stood empty and increasingly in need or renovation. All that remains of the building is its clocktower.