Monday 31 March 2014

Former Yorkshire Post Building, Leeds, March 2014

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Yorkshire Post HQ - Leeds, March 2014

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Scheduled for demolition, the Paper’s office staff moved a few hundred yards to 1 Whitehall in 2012 leaving this production facility / iconic landmark empty.

The buildings consist of the charmingly brutal octagonal concrete office building fronting Wellington St with, and to the rear the production facility which is now stripped of the machinery.

English Heritage said in February 2013 the buildings would not be listed owing to the tight integration of the architecture with the building’s use for printing, and the loss of that use diminished “its ability to demonstrate its original function” and had “impacted on the integrity of the building”.

Designed by John Madin, a stalwart of the brutalist Architectural movement in the UK from the 1950's onwards. His practice was responsible for a lot of the mucky, neglected concrete buildings that populated Birmingham until a great many were recently demolished. 

It was excellent to have a roam around in here and I'd been wanting to do so for a while. There were a great many empty office spaces although the Archives and photography department held loads of ancient bits and pieces which made for pleasurable rummaging.

A Few photos all shot hand held at ISO 1billion with added HangoverShake

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Empty bits

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This office was echoey and full of old football programmes.

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Archivey bit.

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Quite evidently millions of these little record cards detailing headlines from each section of the paper from each day from the beginning of time.

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Copies of the "Leeds Intelligencer" as the paper was called reet back in the olden days.

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Production & Maintenance.

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Thanks for looking in on this slice of Leeds now about to disappear. 

7 comments:

  1. Sad to see it go, I too have lots of pictures of the inside looking desolate...

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  2. Are all those archive index cards still there? How would one go about salvaging them?

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    1. I assume so Louise, I'm not sure how you'd go about salvaging them. Perhaps best to ask the YEP.

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  3. I've contacted Leeds City Council archive dept to ask if they could ask YPN if they would gift any of this material to the city. It would be a dreadful thing if it was binned. It is possible that some of it is already in storage somewhere, Wakefield was mentioned to me by somebody.

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  4. Blimey, this brings back memories. Served my time in that windowless bunker during the 1990s.

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  5. Nice work, Joe. I've got a set of pics of the press hall before a lot of the inserting machinery was stripped out here... https://www.flickr.com/photos/29619702@N08/sets/72157630172325910/

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