Must Leeds always lose?
Attendees heading to Leeds Dock for the “Real Estate Investment and Infrastructure Forum” in May are in for a treat. Infrastructure-lovers arriving in the northern city by train should go down into the bowels of the station, ignoring the whiff of damp from its position on arches above the River Aire. Cut through the quayside new-builds towards a crumbling stone jetty. A tram was supposed to link the dock to the station. It was never built. Leeds remains the biggest city in Europe without a mass-transit system. Instead, the Twee, a bright-yellow second-hand taxi boat from Amsterdam, has to do.
What Leeds wants, Leeds does not get. Whenever a major infrastructure decision has been made, England’s third-biggest city has invariably been on the wrong end of it. The Leeds limb of hs2, the blighted high-speed rail network, was the first to be cut. Northern Powerhouse Rail, a plan to improve links between Leeds and Manchester, was curtailed. After the city approved an expansion to Leeds Bradford Airport in 2021, the then Conservative government blocked it. The Twee is a bright-yellow reminder of the city’s tramlessness; it runs every 15 minutes at £3 ($3.75) each way.
If ever there was a moment for Leeds to enjoy a shift in fortunes it is now. Sir Keir Starmer, the prime minister, attended university there. Even better, the member for Leeds West and Pudsey is the chancellor, Rachel Reeves. Yet Labour has announced a slew of measures to improve growth in Britain’s thriving south-east. Heathrow is to benefit from a new runway, while a rail route connecting Oxford and Cambridge is to be dotted with new towns. Leeds lost out again. Why?
It is not NIMBYism. At the moment, Leeds is a city of architectural renderings plastered on the side of building sites. Its population grew by 8.1% between 2011 and 2021, the highest rate of any big city bar Bristol. It built 4,441 houses in 2023-24. If every local authority matched it on a per-person basis, Labour would meet its stretching target to build 1.5m homes by 2029. Most do not.
Instead, Leeds has become the laboratory for a dominant strand of thinking in Britain’s Treasury: that infrastructure does not much matter. In this world the relative failure of England’s main cities is the result of a lack of skills, rather than a lack of capital investment. Leeds is an unwilling lab rat. Standing near a ring road where a gleaming high-speed-rail terminus should be is the Asda Centre for Merchandising Excellence. There is no finer place to learn the best way to sell a sausage; there is no worse place to try to catch a train.
The result is economic purgatory, with the city unable to either truly thrive or wither. Take Temple Works, a bizarre warehouse that combines Egyptian-style hieroglyphs and experimental Victorian engineering. It is the heart of a redevelopment to the south of the main station in Leeds and was to be the site of the British Library’s northern branch. At the last budget, Ms Reeves chopped its funding of £10m. The building is Grade I-listed, meaning it must be cherished. The British state enforces the obligations of a rich country with the means of an increasingly poor one. If the area is to grow, it will have to do so around a rotting hulk.
When investment is greeted with technocratic scepticism, only politics can loosen the purse-strings. It is a game Leeds has played badly. Greater Manchester has long managed to pull together. It is a coherent whole, politically and economically. By contrast, “West Yorkshire”, the newish combined authority of which Leeds is the most important part, is an awkward compromise. “We just thought people in Yorkshire hated everyone else,” said David Cameron, a former prime minister, during one row in the region. “We didn’t realise they hated each other so much.” It is still the neatest summary of intra-Yorkshire politics.
A paranoid style shapes the city’s politics. The current government insists it is committed to a tram in Leeds, just as the government was committed to a tram under the Conservatives in 1993 and under Labour in the 2000s. There will be shovels in the ground by 2028, insist local politicians. Those in the city will believe it when they see it; local investors are unwilling to place money on it either. Yet more economic stasis is the result.
Some fall from paranoia into conspiracy and the idea that politicians and civil servants in the south-east actively want the region to fail. The reality is more depressing: government is institutionally incapable of caring about a middling city, doing fine but not well. Leeds was never a post-industrial wasteland. It did not require the fiscal cpr applied to Liverpool or Teesside. An official from the Treasury visiting for the day will see cranes in the sky and the city centre’s curious mix of Greggs, a baker, and stores selling Gucci and assume all is peachy.
Yet the government looks past places like Leeds when it comes to growth. Ms Reeves and the Treasury focus on the south because it pays Britain’s bills. Only two regions are net contributors to Britain’s coffers: London and the south-east. Leeds is caught in a trap: too prosperous to pity, but still too poor to pay its own way.
Can’t spell Leeds without an L
If Britain has a growth problem, it is not just that it has hobbled high-potential stars such as Oxford and Cambridge in the south, but also in part because cities like Leeds underperform. And if Leeds has a problem it is because a place like Leeds Dock is almost empty. Local businesses rule out moving there because it is poorly connected. No amount of signs declaring it “LEEDS CREATIVE DISTRICT” in a tasteful sans-serif font changes that. On a fine recent winter’s afternoon the place is dead. The only noise comes from the builders ripping down flammable cladding from the surrounding buildings and the Twee blasting its horn as it rounds a bend on the Aire. ■
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