ARCADES PROJECT

County Arcade is the glamorous member of the Leeds Arcade family of five. It’s certainly an impressive building still today, almost 125 years after it first opened. With its neighbour and close sibling Cross Arcade, it now forms part of what has been dubbed the ‘Victoria Quarter’ of Leeds.

I actually like what Leeds (and a few other towns and cities around the country) have done by creating a new covered street with new stained-glass roof running parallel to County Arcade. I may well begin to review these modern-day arcades as this arcades project progresses, but for now it is the vintage arcades which are still functioning as shopping arcades that interest me the most, and County Arcade is a fine example.

County Arcade has gone for the high-end, designer-label market, very different therefore from the three other arcades in Leeds which don’t come under the Victoria Quarter umbrella. It’s all fine boutiques, designer handbags, beauty and very upmarket, which makes it harder for someone like me to pick out my favourite shop in the arcade, as I simply never shop in places like these (so I am clearly more like Alan Bennett, who 30 years ago said he hoped his favourite building in Leeds – County Arcade – would sell things people want rather than ‘what they can be persuaded to want.’)

Like Bennett, I love the arcade, though.

There is so much for the eye to enjoy, from the classic arcade look as you enter, with its fine glass ceiling and iron girders supporting the roof, down to the lamps hanging in lines along its length, and the mosaic flooring underneath. But my favourite features in the County Arcade have to be the Art Nouveau paintings high up in the four corners of the glass domes, depicting figures at work and leisure under one of the ceilings, and concepts like ‘Labour’ or the ‘Arts’ under the other. I also love the smaller touches like the white rose embedded into the ironwork railings of the upper balconies, just reminding us all which county we are in here.

Since my picks of the arcade’s past stories all come from what was once the café and then the ballroom in the arcade, I was keen to see where that is in today’s arcade. It took a while, mind. I knew it was on the upper level, but eventually I spotted high up above what is the entrance for the Reiss clothes store today some rubbed out signage, so well erased that I can’t be sure whether the original wording was ‘Ceylon Café,’ (the original 1903 café) or ‘Lyons Café,’ (which held the space through the First World War and for much of the interwar period). I don’t think it was signage for the Mecca-Locarno, which was there from 1938 to 1970, but go and have a look- see what you think. And if anyone knows for sure, do get in touch.

My pick of the arcade’s past

Some online articles (often copied and pasted without checking) have the County Arcade as dating from 1898, some from 1900. What is more likely is that building work began in 1898 but the arcade opened just in time for Christmas shopping 1900, as that was when new shops in the premises began to advertise in the ‘new arcade’.

The Ceylon Café opened in October 1903, filling a gap in the after-matinee places for tea in the centre of Leeds. An orchestra played for the coffee and tea drinkers, there was a smoke room, and the chance to play chess, dominoes or draughts if such was your fancy – 30 odd boards were available in the smoke room. The arcade’s architect, Frank Matcham (London), also designed the café’s interior, with marble columns, archways and a fountain in the centre of the space. There was a white marble staircase up to tables on the first floor balcony.

Suffragettes caused an outcry in the Lyons Café (former Ceylon Café) in County Arcade one Saturday in 1913, in what would today be called a ‘flash mob.’ The local newspaper, the Yorkshire Evening Post, clearly hostile to the campaigners, headlined with the ‘Shrieking sisterhood,’ and spoke of the event as a ‘miserable failure.’ Several supporters of women’s suffrage placed themselves around the café balcony in time for Mrs Cohen, a well-known militant who was active also in London, to stand up and begin to make a speech. She was so quickly escorted off the premises that some say the Café management had been forewarned. Whether or not it was a ‘success,’ the hostile newspaper devoted more than half a column to the incident.

50 waitresses and kitchen hands went on strike and formed picket lines outside the arcade café in June 1919, after one of their colleagues was dismissed. They demanded the girl be reinstated and their trade union recognised. The café management kept the place open with a skeleton staff but the protest drew crowds to the arcade that day and the strikers tried to persuade passers-by not to enter the café. Police were brought in to try to move the crowds along through the arcade, and some of the waitresses were prosecuted for harrassing a girl who chose to continue working.

In 1938 the Mecca Locarno dance hall opened in the arcade on the premises of the old Ceylon and Lyons cafes. 300 people a night would dance until 11.30pm, with one favourite dance being The Chestnut Tree, a follow-up to The Lambeth Walk, which also started in the 1930s. The dance hall claimed to serve 1000 coffees and meals every day. The dance hall finally closed in 1970, but by that time had become a favourite haunt for many of the star-studded Leeds United football team of that era.

Sources for the above stories all www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk and specifically: 1) Leeds Mercury, 22 October 1903; 2) Yorkshire Evening Post, 5 May 1913 – National World Publishing Ltd; 3) Yorkshire Evening Post, 27 June 1919, National World Publishing Ltd; 4) Yorkshire Post & Leeds Intelligencer, 22 November 1938, National World Publishing Ltd – all courtesy of the British Library Board.

This arcade in films or books

County Arcade is writer Alan Bennett’s favourite building in his home town of Leeds. He did a BBC 2 brief monologue on the arcade in 1991 for the series ‘Building Sights’, and called it ‘one of the poshest places in Leeds’ in his childhood – He called the arcade ‘festive, exuberant, theatrical.’

Surely Bennett set some of his plays or stories in the arcade if he liked it so much. Can anyone help with a reference?

Photographs

The Victoria Quarter in Leeds has a photograph policy, meaning I was unable to take photos inside with building without permission, and since I received no reply to my request, sadly my County and Cross Arcade entries will have only one photo of the outside, pending that reply (and assuming it is positive of course, otherwise these risk being the only arcades in An Arcades Project without a full gallery of pictures, which would be a shame for such a stunning example).

What memories do you have of visits in years gone by?

Have you got any good stories to add on the past of this arcade?

What’s your favourite shop in the arcade today?

Is there a website for this arcade?

County Arcade itself does not have a website but the Victoria Quarter in Leeds does. Here is a link; it is regularly kept up-to-date.