I tell my southern friends a lot of stories.
I tell them that Yorkshire girls are better than any others (in my experience, I believe this to be completely true). I tell them that Leeds United are the only football club worth following.
I have also been known to tell them that Leeds, more than most, is a city of high ambition.
Today was a quieter day, staying around the city, lunching at the brand new Cafe 164 on the ground floor of Munro House beside the BBC where The Culture Vulture resides. The refurbishment of Munro House – once left abandoned, as I would see as I passed by every time I caught the 40 bus from Halton and approached town – is an ambitious project, which will bring an inspiring and impressive creative space close to the Playhouse. More on that to come, I’m sure.
Later in the afternoon I caught the Horsforth train and headed for Trinity & All Saints, where start-up community channel Leeds TV have been working with media students over the summer. As they work to secure government licence for local television, they are engaged in something truly ambitious themselves. Watch out for my #challengemark interview coming up soon!
Think of the great Victorian civic elders and their ambitions for the city. It was a group of local worthies that came together to form the Leeds Improvement Society, paving the way for the great Town Hall to be built. They insisted, with splendid Victorian pomp and confidence, that “if a noble municipal palace that might fairly vie with some of the best European cities were to be erected in the middle of their hitherto squalid and unbeautiful town, it would become a practical admonition to the populace of the value of beauty and art, and in course of time men would learn to live up to it”.
Think of the football club: when Don Revie arrived at the helm in the early sixties, he too was inspired by a spirit akin to that of those noble locals who wanted to build a Town Hall that would make the city great. One of his first decisions was to replace the club’s traditional blue-and-gold colours with an all-white strip based on the legendary Real Madrid team. It would be like watching lowly Scunthorpe United adopt the colours of world-beating Barcelona today: extremely ambitious, but so laughable it’s faintly endearing.
As a child in the boom years of the nineties, I remember hearing entrepreneurs and councillors in Leeds waxing ambitious about building a great European city, a northern capital, a centre for everything from business and financial services to luxury retailers.
The city’s self-confidence – like that of the football club – once seemed like hubris. My grandfather was a joiner who went looking for work all over the world when times were difficult, from Germany all the way to North Africa and even as far as the Falklands after the war. At the end of the century, as tower cranes littered the skyline at home in Leeds, raising executive apartments and office blocks, there was an abundance of opportunities for him to make good.
As the boom petered out, however, the city’s story became a running joke: plush riverside flats without any tenants; mocked for 
appearing to think of itself as the “Barcelona of the North” just because it has a Harvey Nichols and a Jamie’s Italian.
Leeds United has had a similarly turbulent journey, reaching the semi-finals of the Champions League before a period of massive investment in players failed to meet with sufficient achievement, leading many bright stars to ditch the club, leaving it to plunge down the Football League. To some, the club became a laughing stock; to others, it was a disaster zone, a symbol of the worst excesses in the English football culture.
For better or worse, an intense ambition has always marked the Leeds card. When Revie left in 1974, the bullish young Brian Clough – having already proven himself by taking the humble Derby County to the top of the Football League – wanted the job. He hated Leeds United, and told the players in no uncertain terms, describing them as cheats who had never won fairly.
But he hated Don Revie yet more, driven by a desire to do one better than him: to win the league, but “win it better”; and more importantly, to win the European Cup – which Don had never quite managed to do. He was a bright manager, destined for great things with another small club that he would take to dizzying heights; but at Leeds, as we see in the controversial novel, taken to the big screen as The Damned United, Clough was sacked after a mere forty-four days.
Meanwhile, when Peter Ridsdale – the chairman who had sanctioned the unprecedented investment in playing staff and the racking up of millions of pounds of debts in the late nineties – left Leeds United, the club gradually fell closer and closer to the brink of financial ruin.
But in 2005, as Leeds were slipping deeper and deeper into the abyss, who should step forward to take over the reins for “one last challenge” but the old war-dog Ken Bates. Having bought Chelsea for one pound in the eighties, he gradually built them into a business institution – not just a football club – which could take on the world, as indeed it does today. Not the kind of man to pass up a business opportunity, it is not to be forgotten that he came to Leeds in order to do it. Leeds has always been a place of ambition, somewhere people want to make their mark.
This is yet another part of the local story that I want to explore over the coming weeks, and to do so with your help. It was in evidence as I looked around the now-neglected eco-flats on North Street on my first day (there is so much every day that I see and hear, but which I forget to include in my blog diary – I’ll probably return to different places and people regularly in my mind throughout the month).
I met Erica and Joanna at West Yorkshire Metro today too: they have given their generous support on my quest around the region by offering a free pass that will give me unlimited travel by bus and rail in the county, as well as a handful of their DayRover family passes which we’ll be offering to our readers. They have some great ticket offers which are well worth checking out for anyone heading out on their home tours this month.
WY Metro have made it easier for me to be ambitious on my way around God’s Own Country this month too! The bold things that people around Yorkshire are pouring their heart and soul into – these are what I want to know about. Bring it on!