Westfield – Wasted Opportunity
In which Walter Grumpius airs his forthright opinion …
For all the improvement of aspect it has brought to the centre of the city, Trinity Leeds as a resource has – to deal generously – limitations. One of the measures that ought to be applied to this sort of development is, ‘Does it have a bookshop?’
Twenty years ago, in a Trinityless Leeds, one would have had no difficulty in securing a copy of one of the poet Dante’s lesser-known prose works. Nowadays one has to go online, offshore, and deal with tax cheats.
Morally therefore, it probably served me right that I wasn’t at home when the postman attempted to deliver the oversize package. Consequently I had to detour to the parcel office in central Bradford to collect it and the walk from Forster Square Station afforded the opportunity to check progress on the Westfield Depression.
Until now, contemplating this sink of inactivity had rarely – let’s say never – been uplifting. The gruesome parody of a park – or Urban Garden as the flowerless waste of tawdry grass, intrusive tarmac and ludicrous miniature pagoda was christened – and the vast abutting fenced-off void constituted a gaping wound in the side of the city, a festering indictment of those responsible. Of course no one can be blamed for economic downturns (well, actually, they can, but probably not at civic level) but the disappointing thing has been the singular lack of imagination.
The space could have been used constructively in the meantime. Why not have parcelled the area out into temporary allotments with gardeners able to sell produce at what might have been a colourful farmers’ market on the increasingly desolate Broadway? Or given the whole thing over to kids with trail bikes? Or filled it with water and let folk play with boats? Or put in a few trenches and redefined it as a First World War Experience theme park? No doubt the sensible answer to those questions would have involved health and safety, but sometimes that argument sounds more like a smokescreen for inertia than a genuine concern for folks’ wellbeing.
But anyhow, and praise be, at long last the earth-movers JCBs and cranes have been deployed.
Mercifully the urban garden has been put out of its misery and has become that to which, in truth, it always aspired – a blessed apotheosis as a ploughed-up acreage of mud, now enclosed by an extension of the perimeter fencing which was being given its undercoat even as I visited. One cannot fault the care that has been taken to maintain and fortify the means of exclusion over the years.
So to what prodigy of vision, inspiration and wit can we look forward as things take shape over the next several months? Which contemporary equivalent of John Ruskin have the city fathers invited to advise them on the style and content of the arising development? Topographically Westfield is on an axis of architectural excellence to match anything in West Yorkshire – to its west the City Hall, St George’s Hall, the Victoria Hotel and the Wool Exchange, to its east the elegant structures of Little Germany. So what signal expression of imagination, what challenge to the eye and mind, what joyful iteration of the human spirit can we anticipate to complement Lockwood and Mawson’s stunning legacy?
This:
The heart sinks, the spirit deflates, the soul shrinks, the mind atrophies and dies; the only part that dilates is the lower intestine. So this is what we have been waiting for if this artist’s projection is to be believed – and one fears that this may be it at its picturesque best – another dreary low-level, ground-hugging, anytown dilution of all that’s ordinary, uninspired and uninspiring. The concrete bollards in the foreground and the already extant National Westminster bank on the extreme right edge are as far as the eye can bear to go.
One might argue that this is just another superfluous shopping precinct and car park, so why think of its building as though it were the Duomo or the Djenné Mosque or Ripon Cathedral. Think instead of the jobs it will create, the income it will generate. But if Leeds can produce something as engaging and attractive and enhancing of its neighbourhood out of a retail mall as it has done with Trinity, then why can’t Bradford at least make the effort to issue a similarly photogenic, spirit-enhancing ‘look at us’ statement rather than agree to a plan that looks weary, stale and old before it has even been born.
Of course, one should wait and see. But if this precinct – The Broadway as it is going to be called – includes a bookshop, then I promise to liquidise my copy of Dante’s The Banquet and mix it with whatever other ingredients of humility are necessary to bake a humble pie and eat the resultant confection at the entrance.
Meanwhile, at least, the ex-urban garden is undergoing its terminal makeover.
