“O tell her, Swallow, thou that knowest each
That bright and fierce and fickle is the South,
And dark and true and tender is the North.”
So writes Alfred Lord Tennyson, as great a Victorian monolith as Brodrick’s Leeds Town Hall or Salt’s Mill.
In his short lyric, he implores the Swallow to fly to his love “flying, flying South” and tell her just this, that “dark and true and tender is the North”. The poet has, he insists, long since made his nest in the North. But he sends the Swallow to urge her away from the mild but dull climes of the South, to stay with him instead.
“O tell her, brief is life but love is long,
And brief the sun of summer in the North,
And brief the moon of beauty in the South.”
My sun of summer lasted twenty-eight days of August in the North this year: twenty-eight days, and today the last.
I had promised to meet an old friend in Leeds today. Neither of us would admit it to the slightest similarity, but we have shared a distinctly similar journey: we attended the same school; we both went on to Oxford, both reading English, both emerging at the end with an average bog-standard result for our efforts; and both returning to the homestead, wondering what to do next – the world at our feet like the ice-cold seas at the bottom of the cliff.
He however lives out on the edge of the countryside, rather than a ten-minute bus ride from the city centre as I do. His Leeds is the familiar one: the shops on Briggate, the clubs by the Merrion Centre, the cinema at The Light. His Leeds is the junk-food Leeds I was force-fed as a teenage brat too.
We met on Briggate outside McDonalds (resolving a moment’s confusion over the phone as we couldn’t see each other; there are of course two McDonalds on Briggate…). But we went for lunch at The Wardrobe over around Quarry Hill – fittingly for me, as I’d met Emma and Phil there for a drink twenty-eight days earlier. (It wasn’t the romantic quality however, but the joint’s free Wi-Fi – as we both wanted to keep an eye on the transfer deadline news…)
My friend, quite reasonably, didn’t even know of the place. As only an occasional, social visitor to the city centre, it was outside the environment he knew – the sad dead edges, along with the Kirkgate Market and the rest of Quarry Hill to the east, anywhere beyond the water to the south, and beyond Oceana in the north (apart perhaps from the key spots on the Headingley Mile).
I told him what I’d learnt this month about the history of the site where we sat and had our lunch, and about its blossoming status as a cultural quarter today; about the BBC building over the road, the West Yorkshire Playhouse, the music college, and the brand new gallery space at Munro House (of course now home of ‘The Culture Vulture’ – if a bird in proud flight can regard any place as its home).
I told him about the people I’d met endeavouring to re-vitalise some of these places, bring about a change in habits so that they come to the centre of our consciousness – so that the market becomes a first port of call for shoppers in the city, or so that the area around Quarry Hill becomes another nightlife destination. The Leeds Gallery and Cafe 164 at Munro House, for instance; or Nick and Rebecca at The Source in the Kirkgate Market.
And he of course agreed: it’s a matter of changing habits, of bringing these places into the centre of what the ordinary locals milling about on Briggate or wandering through The Light consider in their collective consciousness to be their city.
We finished our lunch and headed back towards where we’d started. He had been looking for somewhere to buy some new clothes, not something either of us enjoys. He asked me if I knew anywhere a bit different. He knew TK Maxx; he knew Gap; he knew Primark. Immediately I suggested the Corn Exchange.
It was his first visit – for that matter, it was my first visit since being a little boy. You can compare the Corn Exchange to many things: it’s a tardis, far more magisterial and vast than it appears from the outside. Looking skywards it gives you vertigo: I said it was like a train station; he thought it was like a boat.
Yet the place was all but deserted, only visited by a handful of patrons quietly sipping their mid-afternoon coffee, the odd middle-aged passer-by glancing at the leaflets on display in the lobby, and a security guard hanging around listlessly by one of the staircases.
We looked inside the fashion boutiques (curiously glancing at the American vintage shop and even the bodybuilders’ shop), seeing what we could find. He even saw some of the gaudy belts on show in one of the shops and said to himself, “I’ll come back for one of those the next time I’m here.”
Again, if only more of us knew what has always been right in front of us…
“O Swallow, Swallow, if I could follow, and light
Upon her lattice, I would pipe and trill,
And cheep and twitter twenty million loves.”