Leeds

Leeds has always felt to me like a city that rewards commitment. It doesn’t have the immediate legibility of York or the coastal drama of Whitby — it’s large, post-industrial, still working out what it is — but it has depth that a lot of more immediately attractive cities lack. The best things here are layered inside other things: the food hall inside the market, the independent shops inside the Victorian arcade, the good restaurants inside what look from the outside like unremarkable streets.

I arrived on a Friday afternoon and made the mistake of going to Kirkgate Market first, intending to spend twenty minutes. I spent two and a half hours.

Kirkgate Market

Kirkgate Market is the largest covered market in Europe by some measures, and it operates in a Victorian cast-iron and glass hall from 1904 that is one of the finest market buildings in England. The grand hall is the part worth knowing: rows of stalls selling food, cloth, haberdashery, vegetables, bread, cheese, and everything else, under a glazed roof that fills the interior with diffused northern light.

The market trades six days a week and has the working quality of a place that serves a city rather than performs for visitors. I found Indian sweets from a Bangladeshi confectioner who had been in the same spot for over thirty years, a stall selling secondhand vinyl with very strong opinions about its own curation, and a hot salt beef sandwich that I ate standing up at a narrow counter along the back wall.

The Victorian Arcades

Leeds has a cluster of Victorian shopping arcades in the city center that have survived because their architecture was too good to demolish and the retail demand for their unusual footprints kept finding new tenants. The Thorntons Arcade (1878) has a clock with mechanical figures that strike the hours. The Grand Arcade has the highest vaulted ceiling. The Leeds Corn Exchange — an oval building with a glass dome, converted from its original grain trading function — now houses independent food and drink vendors and occasional markets.

This cluster of late-Victorian commercial architecture within a few blocks of each other represents the peak of a kind of civic ambition that Leeds had in 1875 and that most cities have since demolished. Walking between them, popping in and out, is an excellent way to spend a morning.

The Food Scene

Leeds has developed a restaurant scene over the past fifteen years that is genuinely worth planning around. The Calls and the Meanwood Road area have reliable concentrations of good places, but the city’s food culture has dispersed enough that good meals appear in unexpected neighborhoods. Bundobust, which serves Indian street food with Yorkshire-brewed craft beer, is the most cited example of the Leeds food story — it started here and expanded only reluctantly — but the broader field is more interesting than any one venue.

Lia and I ate at a Korean-Japanese place in Meanwood that had been there for about eight months and was operating at full capacity on a Wednesday night, which is usually a meaningful indicator. The food was precise and affordable. We walked back along the canal path and the reflection of the warehouse-conversion apartments in the water looked like a different city to the one we’d arrived in.

Headingley and Hyde Park

The neighborhoods north of the center — Headingley, Hyde Park, Burley — are the university town within the city, dense with student houses, independent cafes, record shops, and the particular energy of large numbers of young people with minimal income and substantial ambition. Chapel Allerton, further north, has drifted upmarket and has excellent brunch places. The variety of Leeds neighborhoods means the city repays lateral exploration considerably more than the center alone.

When to go: Year-round city with no strong seasonal penalty. The cultural calendar is fullest from September through May. The food scene is at its most active during term time when the university population is in residence. Leeds First Direct Arena brings touring acts that fill the city center hotels in ways that can make accommodation expensive and noisy — check the events calendar before booking.