Alan Bennett Building Sites

first on BBC 2 writer Alan Bennett's sites are firmly set on his favorite building the county arcade in leads when in my early 20s I first went to Italy to Venice and Florence I couldn't at first understand why it all seemed so familiar I knew these buildings I knew them because I'd been brought up in leads where so many of the banks and Commercial premises were modeled on reproduced even the palace and baptistries and as here the bell towers of Renaissance Italy when in the 60s leads like most northern cities were sacked by property developers many of these 19th century buildings were demolished and those that remained were washed you can always tell when some Act of architectural murder has been committed because the surviving witnesses to it are washed in dubious experation lady McBeth was probably an arch detect among the happier even frivolous survivors though are the arcades County arcade was always the poshest but never quite So Posh as it looks today when it's been handsomely restored there's always something festive about County arcade something exuberant and Theatrical and it wasn't until I was asked to do this program but I found out why this arcade is one of the few as it were lay buildings by an architect who was known for his design for innumerable Victorian and Edwardian theaters Frank machum the arcade does have a connection with the theater in that it was part of a scheme designed by matcham to link up with his Empire Theater L down brigard I remember the Empire when I was a boy because it used to advertise some of its stalls as fot a word I found both mysterious and unpronouncable I was told it meant armchairs and on the one occasion I went to the Empire I was bitterly disappointed to find there weren't the kind of armchairs that were part of our three-piece Suite the Empire is long gone but here's the county arcade which somehow to me almost smacks of the seaside I think it's the material glazed brick made at burmont's outside leads which is also the stuff of the grander hotels and boarding houses on the front at moram and Cleveland as a child I was in this arcade more often than most and I don't apologize for the fact the charm of it now has as much to do with memory as with architecture I can remember many of the shops in particular a toy shop that was here at the start of the second war toys were in short supply and my dad who was a butcher with a co-op had invested in a fret saw and started making toy animals his speciality were penguins which he mounted on little green four-wheel carts and on his afternoon off he'd Hawk these round the toy shops of leads though without much success then one afternoon he came to a toy shop here called smarts run by Mr Balon old Balon dad always called him and he offered to take Dad's entire output though at a much reduced rate so every week after that my mom and dad and sometimes my brother and me would come down with Carri a back bags with the week's output of penguins and the occasional giraffe there seemed my brother and me a very dull toy but if we ever saw a child trailing one behind it we'd hang about hoping to overhear an expression of pleasure my dad presumably experiencing the same fra as an author does when he catches someone reading one of his books there are some surprising survivals there was a corser here in the' 40s and the same firm of corsers is here now it's a curious trade and not one I associate with the present day of course corser seldom had premises he tended to be a profession taken up by Single Ladies of a certain age who'd go around and do fittings in the home my aunt Evin was a corser an ample lady like many of them she was a model for the product she was marketing this used to be the mecca Bor room which imparted a degree of whoopy to the arcade it was thought by me at any rate to be a place of great wickedness there Boys in my class at school would sometimes go dancing there and come back swearing that they'd seen a prostitute the cast iron proof a chain worn round the ankle and here is Cash DHA the Gent Outfitters where we used to get our school blazers but didn't used to get those great class indicators Cash's name tapes which better class boys had sewn in all their clothes all of which will irritate you a great deal if you're just wanting to hear me talk about the architecture after though I am to see this place so splendidly restored if I'm honest it's a bit too smart too done up for me and these painted leaves make it look like Christmas all the year round still that's a small price to pay to keep it from the bulldozer oh that the financial institutions which rule our lives and which have paid for this restoration had learned their lesson 10 years earlier in which case England would be a better place to live in as it is I'd like to come back here in in 20 or 30 years time it'll all seem a bit less synthetic time will have weathered these slightly too twe shop fronts and Faded the guilt a bit and maybe one or two of those seedar establishments will have begun to creep back a herbalist perhaps or a secondhand book shop shop selling what people really want rather than what they can be persuaded to want nowadays we live to shop it's the only thing that holds us together as the late blessed Margaret said there's no such thing as Society only shoppers if we can't shop we get depressed or feel oppressed the Deliverance of Eastern Europe not so much the restoration of Freedom as the restoration of freedom to shop there are small specialized shops selling chocolates shops selling Poore and scented candles card shops with messages for every conceivable occasion grave and gay and straight kitchen shops shops selling jams in esoteric combinations rhubarb and ginger Armond and apricot out of the way mustards pedigree vinegars lovely lovely shopping what

Channel: nofishnochips

Views: 46,216

Keywords: Alan Bennett, Leeds, architecture

Id: W93qsJv0T9U

Length: 9min 26sec (566 seconds)

Published: Sat Feb 28 2009