A Walk Around Hunslet to The Tetley

wpid-IMG_20131121_145926.jpg

Take a walk out of town, over Leeds Bridge and past The Adelphi, and… Welcome to Hunslet. Though you could be forgiven for thinking you had stumbled into a parallel universe – one where Stalin had scrapped the Warsaw Pact, invaded the North, and declared a Soviet Republic of South Leeds stretching from Stourton to the River Aire.

wpid-IMG_20131121_150055.jpg

There’s even an iron curtain. Sort of. Try getting to the river from Waterloo Street, walking toward the Royal Armouries. For more than half the length of the road you can’t get anywhere near owing to locked metal gates and private property warning signs.

wpid-IMG_20131125_160105.jpg

The development tracing the Northernmost boundary of Hunslet is mostly chicken coop flats linked by chicken run corridors with chicken wire balconies overlooking a shapeless, nameless car-crammed expanse. Most people would feel about as inclined to linger and explore this place as much as your average chicken feels encouraged to idle away an hour or two at a factory farm.

wpid-IMG_20131125_160138.jpg

Turn right at the Brewery Wharf sign and right again at the bottom of Black Bull St (where there’s a car showroom, possibly the longest currently surviving business in all of Hunslet) and you pass a retail park – during opening hours walking across it requires SAS basic training and nerves of carbon fibre – and a large glass box office building, Leeds City Office Park. When did the word “park” come to signify a place entirely opposite in function and purpose from what most of us mean by the word? The only bit of green in these places is there simply to obscure the clinically barren swathe of tarmac occupying the majority of the space between the buildings from the view of passing motorists.

wpid-IMG_20131125_154648.jpg

Offices these days, being places where no real work is done, seem to be built on the model of vast specimen cabinets exhibiting the many exotic varieties of post-industrial labour. It’s as if they are trying desperately to reassure the outside world, “look, we are working in here, really! Just you watch us…” There are many office blocks like this one dotted across the South side of the river like a long gallery of backlit cabinets in a Museum of Modern Alienation.

wpid-IMG_20131125_154653.jpg

Most of LS10 is much of a muchness. Hunslet in name but it could be any place at all – indifferent buildings, non-descript public spaces, interchangeable design. Walking around here generates an odd ambient anxiety of mislocation, familiarity mixed with a sense that you aren’t quite where you think you are and the place just isn’t what you thought it was.

wpid-IMG_20131121_150044.jpg

Then there’s Tetley’s. Solid, frank, dependable, old Tetley’s. It never was a “great” or, God forbid, “iconic” building – for most of the people from South of the river it was just the place your uncle worked, nothing particularly special, just a fixture of the local economy, the place you derived a pay packet. For most of my life I’ve known people who worked in there – it took a good portion of the lads from my school (not the brightest ones to be fair, they went to Braimes, Yorkshire Chemicals and Alf Cooke’s), my sisters father-in-law worked most of his life there, and ironically when I looked around the place the other day I knew one of the bar staff (hello Alex!) In fact the only person I knew who didn’t manage to get a job there was my friend Suhkdev, who was let go the week before his government training scheme ended on the basis that “Tetley’s don’t employ Paki’s” – an interesting anecdote considering the opening exhibition at The Tetley (I’m finding it hard to call it that yet) “takes the theme of labour, the telling of overlooked or fading history”. I wonder how much of Tetley’s own not always enviable labour history will be overlooked? I know people who could tell some right old tales about the place … though I’m not sure they would be considered appropriate for an art exhibition.

wpid-IMG_20131121_150030.jpg

Still, it is great to see a bit of Hunslet’s heritage preserved, and thankfully not turned into a worthy, sanitizing museum (though I do think some of the copy on The Tetley site comes perilously close to reverential guff – can we stop it with all that environment steeped in history tosh? It was a factory, it made beer, and the only thing that was steeped was the night shift, regularly!) It’s going to be a working space and a place that makes stuff, which is as it should be – that’s what Hunslet was all about. And it has a really fine bar.

So next time you happen to find yourself wandering South of the river visiting one of our many fine retail/business/car parks why not head toward the place that actually means something in Hunslet. You actually can’t miss it. Big gold “Tetley’s” on the top.

3 comments

    1. Think the park is still going ahead (though I’m not sure how much of the car park it’ll take.) They’re opening to a selected few people tomorrow so maybe I’ll find out.

      Best bit of the building for me was the brass plaques on office doors, with name and position … remember the days when jobs lasted long enough to be worthy of being cast in brass? Really rather beautiful and poignant.

Comments are closed.