Exploring The Old Yorkshire Post Building
Joe Stenson is a professional wedding photographer based in Leeds, UK. Photography is his hobby and passion. Every now and again Joe likes take a look inside buildings that perhaps he shouldn’t or that any normal person wouldn’t. On the corner of Wellington St sat the home of a prominent Leeds institution, The Yorkshire evening post. With the permission of the paper, Joe was granted an un-guided, free roam tour of the buildings before the bulldozers moved in.
Now well into final demolition phases, the former HQ of Yorkshire’s primary daily newspaper were an iconic corner and marker to the entrance of Leeds visible from the A58M flyover. The Paper’s existing journalistic and office staff moved a few hundred yards to 1 Whitehall in 2012 leaving this production facility and Leeds landmark empty.
As many will appreciate, the styling of the buildings were love or hate and consisted of the brutally charming (or maybe not so charming) concrete office building fronting Wellington St with, and to the rear, the paper’s production facility.
English Heritage rather cruelly declined to historically list the buildings in 2013 owing to the tight integration of the architecture with the building’s use for printing. With the printing element removed, so had “its ability to demonstrate its original function” which apparently “impacted on the integrity of the building”. Some of the interior detailing and size and stature of the spaces were on an enormous scale, especially the cavern like room in the centre of the building, where many old Bradford City football programmes resided, along with Sports reporter’s diaries from the 70’s onwards.
Designed by John Madin, who was 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 some of the UK’s city centres until a great many were recently demolished.
You can find the full set of photos over on Joe’s blog here:
…or follow his adventures on Facebook here: