A Wander Around Shipley

Shipley Remade? Psychogeogging? Walter Grumpius takes an extended look at Shipley, Arn and Dale, with diversions to Armley, Headingley and Cross Gates. The first in an occasional series…

I live in constant apprehension. One day soon, one of the young supplicants after knowledge for whom I entertain a tenuous intellectual responsibility will ask me to explain psychogeography (post-structuralism and queer theory were hard enough).

Rather than sequester myself with Debord, Deleuze, De Certeau and other jolly Gallic theorists I decided a practical approach to understanding might be more instructive and rewarding. So I donned boots and, burdened only with camera, notebook and pen and (hopefully) open mind, began a walk southwards from the Shipley I know well, through Bradford, to Birstall Retail Park, of which I was utterly ignorant. This is a route deliberately chosen for its innocence of anything obviously touristic.

Oblique diversions will from time to time be made – both textual and geographical – for the purposes of contextualisation or to follow the promptings of suggestive association. The indulgence of Culture Vultures permitting, I hope to report the results of the enterprise in a short series of episodes.
The starting point of my walk, le grand depart so to speak of this venture, was Shipley Market Place. This dates largely from the 1960s – a dangerous age for those structures fearful for their lives. All buildings, even stately homes and temples, carry the potential to become slums and yet no building, however ugly or mediocre its architecture, is inherently a slum. Ugliness should not be mistaken for slumliness. Buildings become slums through neglect and loss of function and purpose.

Mostly we view and judge buildings from the outside only. Yet they function much more internally than externally. The façade of a hospital or a hotel might illuminate a street and yet it is the theatres and wards, the dining rooms and bedchambers that justify the structure. Remove that vital function and the mien of the façade will quickly sicken. When the sickness is within, the hopelessness soon manifests itself without.
Shipley Market Place is displaying just such signs of dereliction. That inevitable bacterium attendant upon decay – the charity shop – is multiplying across the square; there are nine, where once there were greengrocers and bakers. The causes of this decline are many and complex but the simplest and most obvious lurks just a hundred yards away to the west.

Asda, that suffocating weed, branded beguilingly green and insinuating from behind its ugly sprawling car park, has slowly but surely sucked the breath out of its neighbours. As if this were not enough, in December 2013 the Council approved an outline application from Wm Morrison to develop a superstore and associated trimmings on a brownfield site a few hundred yards away to the east of the railway station. So, compressed vicelike between two supermarkets and with online retail exerting further pressure from above, it is difficult to see how the market place can retain a sustainable retail purpose.

But not all the blame for the decay should be laid elsewhere; much is intrinsic to the square itself. Deterioration is evident in the poverty of the window-dressing – some of it not even half-hearted – in the empty desolate floors above the shops, in the lack of upkeep, faded paint, chipped plaster, crumbling brickwork – you wouldn’t get that with the local vernacular sandstone – and in the dreary, lacklustre range of retail available. But above all – and it is hard not to be downbeat – the architectural standard of the buildings themselves, with their alien brick and concrete, is at best mediocre.

Take for example the Arndale Centre, a dismal, squat slab of an edifice which dominates and diminishes the southern end of the square. Arndale Centres were to blight a number of towns in the 1960s and 1970s – Leeds thrice over, in Headingley, Armley and Crossgates. They were never likely to evoke aesthetic encomia. The original Arndale in Manchester, clad with brown and beige tiles, was immediately dubbed the largest public lavatory in England by locals. Would that the Shipley Arndale could boast such character!

Arndale was the name coined by two entrepreneurial chancers who seized the opportunities provided by the ‘tear it down and start again cheap’ tendencies of 1960s town planners. Arn was Arnold Hagenbach, a baker from Wakefield; Dale was Sam Chippindale, an estate agent from Otley. Bluff Yorkshire businessmen of the no-nonsense school, the pair married their fortunes, meshed their names and begat, inter alia, the affront to the eye that assails visitors to the southern reaches of Shipley Market Place. Looking at this unleavened building I imagine one of Hagenbach’s pastries – all chemical additives, artificial flavourings and radioactive icing.

But I must stop and reprove myself here. Balance demands that one should fight against the tendency to judge anachronistically and to allow the dictates of today’s subjective aesthetics to obliterate the claims and tastes of a different era. When in 1964 Harold Macmillan famously opined that “most of our people have never had it so good”, he was far from intending irony. He was looking back over the last half-century: the waste of the Great War, the Depression of the 30s, another world war, the austerity and rationing of the 1940s and 50s – the ‘make do and mend’ and ‘waste not, want not’ periods – at last ridden out. From a consumer perspective in the 60s, goods were becoming available again, not just in quantity but in range. Whereas today’s vibrant shopper seemingly cannot do without the added frisson of architectural innovation and adventure – or is not allowed to – back in the 60s one senses that simply to be able to buy clothes and luxuries again and not feel guilty about it was the exciting thing.

With this in mind, Arndale Centres were perfectly of their time, gathering everything under one roof with the thoughtful, bus-station-inspired overhanging shelter running along the pavement outside to keep shoppers dry. The Shipley Arndale hasn’t aged well, but I felt that, for the sake of perspective and the aforementioned balance, I should visit the three Leeds Arndales. The abomination in Bradford can await its turn.

In fact only the Headingley complex retains the name, although I suspect that the buildings on Armley Town Street remain the closest to the original conception. Unfortunately – or happily – I am not old enough to have known these areas prior to the Arndale developments and therefore not in a position to compare and contrast before and after. However, looking today at the lovely curve and slope of Armley’s Town Street, surely one of the city’s pleasanter thoroughfares with its still-decent show of handsome buildings, it is hard not to conclude that – from an architectural point of view at least – the Arndale terrace must have represented a dilution in quality.

The gorgeous sweeping perspective of the street just about rescues the situation and there are still useful shops here but also some pretty desperate ones – The Money Shop, Teddy’s Amusements, Cash Converters. No doubt this is mainly down to the brutal economics of competition and scale. Predicated on the car, the behemoths of consumerism just off the main arteries and beyond the peripherique have wounded grievously the more locally-based and modestly scaled shopping malls. This is a great shame as Town Street evokes love.

While wandering up and down I was arrested by a pavement slab commemorating Benjamin Gott, the 19th century owner of Armley Mills – and a distant ancestor on my mother’s side. In fact this is just one of a number of keystones to be found on the pavements, representing a timeline of some of Armley’s better-known sons and daughters, which I then spent a happy hour exploring whilst ignoring the ostensible purpose of the visit altogether.

Stepping from the train at Crossgates – a first visit to this area of Leeds – my attention was attracted at once by a gorgeous gasometer behind the station. This must be surely one of the sights of the city. I warmed to the place immediately, an impression only enhanced by the corny but witty visual pun on its name located on the roundabout on the ring road.

Whilst the Arndale House still exists, the Arndale centre itself has been superseded by the Crossgates Shopping Centre, a spacious L-shaped mall with a very distinctive metallic ceiling which makes it glitter and glisten, an effect not dissimilar to the lights in the roof of the Trinity Mall. Looking round Crossgates it is hard not to conclude that there are far more shops selling stuff you might actually want to buy than there are in Trinity.

Finally to Headingley. This Arndale Centre I do recall before its makeover and it was a slum. The refurbishment – rather like that for the marvellous Woodhouse Lane car park – has worked wonders, a reminder of what improvements can be wrought by the simple expedients of re-facing and a lick of paint, although the tall Arndale House itself had some significant redevelopment at the eastern wall as well. The long terrace still remains too squat for my taste, but the recladding of the overhang makes the prospect a lot more attractive and the standard and usefulness of the retail has just about survived – after all there’s a post office and a pub selling drinkable ale.

So, perhaps upon reflection the somewhat arbitrary accusation of ‘blight’ needs to be softened just a touch. The architecture was poor, though not irretrievable. There have been some decent brutalist buildings but the Arndale Centres on the whole do not feature among them. The one in Bradford is unspeakably egregious, in Shipley nondescript yet offensively and insinuatingly so. The ones in Leeds have stood up rather better, either because they fail to impact too disastrously on their sprightly and attractive contexts or because they have been sensibly and sensitively refurbished.

But to return to the starting point: I believe the Arndale in Shipley is beyond retrieval, and I also think that Shipley Market Place as a whole should be reconfigured and the town centre relocated elsewhere. But that is another episode.