How South Bank Is Transforming Leeds
Stand on Leeds Bridge and look south. What you are looking at used to be one of the city’s most underused postcodes – former industrial land, cleared sites, the kinds of urban voids that accumulate in post-industrial cities when the manufacturing leaves and nothing organised comes quickly enough to replace it. What you are looking at now is the biggest sustained regeneration effort in the city’s modern history.
The South Bank master plan – 253 hectares of development land between the city centre and the M621 – represents, when complete, the largest urban extension of any city in England. Leeds City Council and a series of development partners have been working toward it for the better part of two decades. What has happened in the last five years is the shift from aspiration to reality.
Sovereign Square
The public space at the heart of the South Bank development is the first thing most visitors encounter and the most successful piece of place-making in recent Leeds history. The square – flanked by office buildings, with the Dark Arches to the north – has become a genuine public space in a way that many developer-built squares fail to achieve. The canal connection gives it a natural activity and the access to the river Aire through the Dark Arches creates a pedestrian circuit that links the South Bank to the city centre without the mediation of a road crossing.
The Arena Quarter
The First Direct Arena on Clay Pit Lane, the residential development to its south and the planned second arena site in the South Bank represent a critical mass of event-infrastructure investment that is changing how the city relates to large-scale entertainment. A city with two arena-capacity venues and the residential population to support them is a different proposition to a city with one.
Victoria Gate
The Eastgate development that became Victoria Gate is the retail anchor of the eastern South Bank zone – a John Lewis building and the Arcade retail street that connects to the existing Kirkgate Market. The Victoria Gate Arcade is genuinely beautiful in a way that Leeds retail had not previously managed, and the connection it creates between the new development and the historic market is one of the smarter pieces of urban design in recent Leeds planning history.
What Comes Next
The current development pipeline includes further residential towers in the South Bank zone, the expansion of the Channel 4 presence in the city following its Leeds office opening, and the ongoing improvement of the Dark Arches pedestrian and cycling corridor that connects the development zones through the Victorian infrastructure beneath the train station. Leeds in 2030 will look materially different from Leeds in 2020, and the South Bank story is why.
Not everyone is uncritical. The gentrification question – what happens to the existing communities and uses as land value increases – is being asked in Leeds as in every regenerating city. The Holbeck area immediately to the south of the South Bank zone is where the tension between incoming investment and existing community is most visible. The regeneration story is not finished and not simple, but its scale is undeniable.