THE WAY WE WERE
A pause for breath as this once battered area is about to undergo an economic transformation. These cars are going to have to move pretty quickly unless they want to be crushed by building equipment…
It’s a peaceful overcast spring morning in Leeds and the Riverside area provides the perfect spot for some ‘all you can eat’ bombsite parking – yours for just a fiver a day and curated by a man in a wooden shed. Despite the fact that it’s mid-morning, all you can hear is ‘Our Tunes’ quietly chattering away on the car park attendant’s radio, the distant hum of traffic from the nearby city centre and the intermittent squeal of brakes and clattering of tracks as the trains slow to enter Leeds Railway Station above.
Close your eyes and your senses will also be assailed by the smell of hot brakes, exhaust fumes and dust from the rough ground; think yourself lucky you’re not here in the summer months. According to a government report into Leeds’ urban regeneration, ‘the river flow during dry summer months was more than two-thirds sewage effluent.’ Things have certainly changed since then. Or have they?
But this is the calm before the storm. Riverside is an intricate network of wharfs and warehouses fed by the Leeds-Liverpool Canal and the River Aire, which runs alongside. It was in a sad state in 1989 with Leeds’ proud role in the Industrial Revolution relegated to the history books. Largely vacated, property developers aided by Urban Development Grants had set their sights on re-developing the area into luxury flats for Thatcher’s emerging generation of Yuppies, who were set to breathe new life into what would eventually become known as the Northern Powerhouse.
But for now, the re-building has just begun and while buildings are being torn down to make way for mirror glass and high rises there’s excellent opportunity to make money from car parking and small businesses. The boom of the late-Eighties is only just beginning to gain momentum as the Nineties hove into view and this is evident by the cars in this picture capturing the back end of the Leeds Exhibition Centre and the railway arches in the distance.
Dominating our picture is a Datsun Sunny Coupé. It’s typical of the sort of car that you’d pay a couple of hundred quid for from the auctions. This one isn’t even ten years old but rust has overtaken it – quite an achievement considering its inland location. YJX 753V wouldn’t have much longer to run; it was last taxed in 1991, and we’ll wager a pint of Northern Monk that it was driven into the scrapyard given how the running gear will have lasted so much longer than the body.
The 1982 Mini 1000 ahead of it appears to be faring better. It looks like a City, and powered by its A-Plus engine,
