From the Times website bloke that wrote it put it up free for an hour via twitter so thought I'd stick up here not a bad read
There is a joke, told by John Bishop, the “comedian”, about how the easiest way to tell the difference between the great northern cities is by asking people what it’s like to live there. His version, though, is slightly wrong. The way he tells it, Liverpool is the exception. Really, it should be Leeds.
Try it. Ask a Scouser, or a Mancunian, how they feel about the place in which they live. They will tell you that they inhabit what is, without question, the greatest city in the world. They will praise its fashion and its music and its sense of self. They will inform you that it is more down-to-earth than London, less smug, but that it boasts the vibrancy of somewhere much larger.
When they tell you this, they would be right, because Liverpool and Manchester are both wonderful cities. But then ask someone in Leeds.
In Leeds, the question “what is it like to live here?” can only ever be met with one response. “It’s all right.” In fact, that serves as a stock response to almost any question asked of anyone in Leeds. Things never get much better than all right. Why should they? Why would you want them to?
Huge sums of money have been spent on making Leeds more than all right in recent years. In fact, huge sums of money have been spent on making Leeds more than all right for about 160 years, ever since construction started – at staggering expense – on the grandiose Town Hall in 1853.
Half a century later they established what is now City Square, complete with a statue of the Black Prince, Edward of Aquitaine. They cleared the slums in the 1930s, building two new estates – Quarry Hill and Gipton – as the big department stores went up in the centre of town. They cleared the slums again in the 1960s.
In the 1990s, as Manchester’s entire city centre was rejuvenated after the Arndale bombing, Leeds decided to burnish its new reputation as “the biggest financial centre outside London” – that was always the boast – by building a Harvey Nichols.
A friend of mine once went in to buy a belt, but has refused to enter since he discovered they were charging £50 for them. “That,” he said, “is too much for a belt.”
Leeds doesn’t like show. When Lee Sharpe bought our local, the former Manchester United player redecorated it. He put down polished floors and installed leather seats. Another friend refused to go in. Leather seats, he said, were an unnecessary affectation, bordering on southern. He only entered once it was pointed out to him that they were wipe-clean, and therefore practical.
Still, though, the makeovers and the revamps and the improvements keep on coming. The Trinity Centre, a shopping centre to rival Liverpool One, opened this year. It has an Urban Outfitters, and two places selling cupcakes.
It is not that these developments are not appreciated. It is not that Leeds is not as vibrant as Manchester or Liverpool. It is not that there is not a sense of fierce loyalty to it, whether you stayed or whether you left. It’s just that we don’t like to rub it in anyone’s faces. Leeds is all right.
The problem with this reticence, sensible and humble though it may be, is that in such silence do myths emerge, and rarely are they of any benefit to Leeds.
Take, for example, the dogma that Newcastle is England’s great one-club city. Newcastle is a great city, no doubt, a grand and friendly and bright place, and Newcastle United are a great club. St James’ Park, looming out over the city as St Vitus Cathedral watches over Prague, wordlessly provides the most eloquent metaphor imaginable for the role football plays in the life of this city, of all cities.
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But Leeds is not far off three times the size of Newcastle. There are 750,000 people in the city itself, compared to 290,000, and some two million in West Yorkshire, compared to 850,000 or so on Tyneside. Perhaps it is because there are other clubs – Bradford City, Huddersfield Town, Halifax – nearby that the myth has been allowed to develop. Perhaps Newcastle is better at the marketing.
Perhaps it is because there are other clubs in Leeds, just not in the same sport. It was only the 1950s and 1960s that Leeds really decided it quite liked football. There are many left who would see it, like Wigan, as a Rugby League town, at least to some extent. Rhinos occupy far more minds in Leeds than the Falcons do in Newcastle.
Or perhaps it is because – as Anthony Clavane describes it in his wonderful memoir, Promised Land – nobody really likes “dirty, greedy, reckless, hubristic Leeds.” Charles Dickens “particularly detested it as an odious place.” George Bernard Shaw, the dramatist, saw it as “a place where no decent individual ought to live.”
Ralph Waldo Emerson blamed the smoke from the city’s power stations for “a dowdy style of dress among the ladies on Briggate.” That, without a shadow of a doubt, has changed, as Leeds’s women have adopted Newcastle’s goose-fat-and-blue-WKD approach to keeping warm in winter.
The city, though, is still scorned, just a little. The club, too, is sneered at. They were Dirty Leeds in the 1970s, and a whole generation cannot forgive them. They were plagued by racists and fascists – as so many other clubs were – in the 1980s, and another generation does not forget. And they were the Leeds who bet the house to chase the dream in the 1990s and lost. They are the Leeds who still stand as a byword for football’s Icarus age, and that still sticks.
I used to watch Leeds a lot as a kid. We sat in the family stand. At the time it was the biggest cantilever stand in the world, apparently. Leeds has long had an obsession with odd boasts. The club used to say they had the tallest floodlights in Europe in the 1980s.
The city built Bridgwater Place in 2005 to be the tallest building in the north – even though it wasn’t – but soon saw it relegated to fourth place, behind the Beetham and Co-Operative Towers in Manchester, and West Tower in Liverpool. That tends to happen with Leeds’s sources of pride. Manchester steals them. They went and built a bigger cantilever stand at Old Trafford. And Manchester has a Harvey Nichols now, too.
The Leeds I saw was not a vintage one – not David O’Leary’s babies – but the Leeds of Tony Yeboah, Pierre Laurent, Gunnar Halle and Richard Jobson. But they were a Premier League side, a decent one, and times were good.
The man who sat in front of us was the funniest football fan I have ever encountered. He spent one entire game supporting the linesman. Leeds won 2-0, but he did not celebrate either goal. He celebrated when the linesman gave a correct decision on a throw-in, and offered his support when the rest of the largest cantilever stand in Europe disagreed. He’d wait for the hubbub to die down and then say, loudly but not deafeningly: “Lino, I’m on your side.” Tomas Brolin scored both goals.
Every time I go back now, for work or as some form of punishment, it strikes me how little things have changed. Linesmen are called assistant referees now, obviously, but Elland Road still looks like it is getting ready for an Elastica concert.
And that, as we gently stroll to the point, is a huge pity for English football. Because, for all the image of a dirty and reckless and hubristic team in a dirty and reckless and hubristic place, it is good for the game when Leeds are good. This is England’s great one club city, and it deserves to be recognised as such.
Read more Rory Smith blogs:
Time to halt the wurlitzer of mediocrity
Young defenders are not given the opportunities they should be
Marcello Lippi leaves Sir Alex Ferguson and co in the shade
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