ABSTRACT

Leeds has a ram on its coat of arms indicating its historic reliance on wool for its clothing industries. It might just as well have put a stick or two of rhubarb. Field after field marched round the outer limits of the town on the south, like a rank, deep, defensive fence; and that had a certain rightness. Like urchins, it seemed to thrive on dirt and smoke. Further out than those streets and beyond the city’s public parks, but before the ‘real country’ began, was a band a mile or so wide of inner fields; it too was so much part of our composite vision of Leeds that in any sorting out of boundaries it would have had to be included. Almost paradoxically, though, the most common quality in the tone and temper of the working-class Leeds knew was local rather than national melodrama.