The Leeds Look

In Leeds, the growth of the financial and business services sector from the mid-1980s onwards resulted in a boom in office developments in the city centre.

[2][3][4] As many of the older industrial buildings were of brick with grey slate roofs, architects designed new ones in these traditional materials.

Additions such as neo-historical detail of terracotta and stone associated with the city's Victorian and Edwardian eras were often approved by Leeds' planners.

[1] This style was intended to derive from Leeds’ Victorian heritage and provide visual coherence with older buildings,[1][5] and was especially used in the city centre and in developments around the waterfront.

[9] Particular criticism has been levelled at the Crowne Plaza Hotel on Wellington Street as being a “missed opportunity”[10] and “a bland exercise in facadism, complete with badly proportioned towers, archways and pediments, supposedly based upon earlier brick warehouses, architecture whose structural integrity it manages to both mimic and mock”.