The film was made by Leeds Cine Club, an enthusiastic group of amateur filmmakers who were very active during the 1970s and 1980s. The club was born in 1965 though its origins go back much further than that having evolved out of the Leeds Camera Club which can be dated back to 1893. Members of the group made films in the small gauge formats standard 8mm and super 8 and were sometimes credited as ‘Leeds Cine Club Super Eight Group’. Working as a loose collective of filmmakers they would often...

The film was made by Leeds Cine Club, an enthusiastic group of amateur filmmakers who were very active during the 1970s and 1980s. The club was born in 1965 though its origins go back much further than that having evolved out of the Leeds Camera Club which can be dated back to 1893. Members of the group made films in the small gauge formats standard 8mm and super 8 and were sometimes credited as ‘Leeds Cine Club Super Eight Group’. Working as a loose collective of filmmakers they would often make and screen films for competitions, public screenings and occasionally collaborate with each other on specific projects. These larger films often involved contributions from two or more camera operators and the group were frequently commissioned to make films on particular subjects. From 1974-1984 Leeds Cine Club filmed the annual Leeds Lord Mayor’s Parade many of these films are now collected at the Yorkshire Film Archive LORD MAYOR'S PARADE 1974 (LEEDS).


Documents held at YFA also suggest that the social aspect of the group was important as were the frequent trips away and Cine Club outings; the sharing of knowledge, discussion and feedback helped members grow as filmmakers and their reputation grew. Later the group dropped the ‘cine’ from their name and renamed themselves Leeds Movie Makers to more accurately reflect the activities of members and the changing technology. Like many of the regional film clubs that sprung up in the post-war period the films that were produced are diverse and highly accomplished with many styles ranging from documentaries about weird and wonderful places YORKSHIRE CURIOSITIES (1959), light hearted historical comedies STONE ME (1980) and spooky dramas set on the North York Moors ANOTHER COUNTRY (1985).


This film LOOK AT LEEDS '78 (1978) was made in 1978 as a newsreel looking back on the year beginning with the celebrations in the aftermath of Leeds Rugby League Football Club Challenge Cup success and covering the 1978 Leeds bus strike, Astroturf being installed at the pitches of Fearnville, Quarry Hill flats in the last stages of demolition and the Festival of Youth at Roundhay with a visit from HRH Princess Margaret.


Remember the bus strike
The 1970s are often remembered by people as being the era of inflation, power cuts, the 3-day week and industrial strife. In Leeds a dispute over service revision and the ‘West Leeds Rationalisation Scheme’ resulted in a 5 week bus strike from April 16 to May 22. The resulting disruption to services meant that the city centre could only be accessed by road via taxi or private car which despite rapid increases in car ownership since the mid-1950s, were still out of reach for most working families particularly given the harsh economic climate of Britain in the 1970s. As the film shows to get around this some resourceful firms resorted to shuttling their staff to and from work using company transport - in this case a fleet of Schofields delivery vans.

Schofields was a famous department store that operated on The Headrow in Leeds between 1901 and 1996. For much of the 20th century Schofields was highly regarded in the region becoming synonymous with Leeds and the quality shopping experience.The store was founded by Snowden Schofield in 1901 as a "fancy drapers and milliners" and was situated on a prime spot on the Headrow, the original premises being a mixture of Victorian era buildings with the Victoria Arcade running through the store. Sadly the original premises were demolished in 1959 to be rebuilt in 1962 in a modernist style typical of the era. In 1988 the store was sold to the Al Fayed brothers who also owned Harrods and were then owners of House of Fraser. Following this, the store, whilst retaining the Schofields name, became part of the House of Fraser chain. Schofields and the Headrow can be seen in other YFA films including  CORONATION CELEBRATIONS LEEDS (1953) and the construction of a rival department store Lewis’s is seen in CONSTRUCTION OF LEWIS'S, LEEDS (1930-32).


Flattening the flats
The vast Quarry Hill development was at one time considered the solution to the housing problem in Leeds in the wake of the mass slum clearances in the period immediately after First World War. Whilst there was a new awareness in some quarters amongst the professional classes of the social health problems associated with slum housing (through campaigns such as Homes Fit for Heroes) and the first council housing projects were being built through subsidies provided by the Housing Act of 1919, little in fact had been done to solve the on-going problem of the inner-city slums. In Leeds this manifested itself in the rows and rows of poorly built back-to-back workers houses with often crowded conditions and poor sanitation. Some of the worst slums in Leeds were in the Quarry Hill area.


Rev. Charles (Charlie) Jenkinson (1887-1949), Vicar of Holbeck and later Leader of Leeds City Council, was elected as a Labour member of Leeds City Council (Leeds Corporation as was then) in 1930 and in 1933 became Chairman of the Housing Commitee. In this role he was responsible for the demolition of 14,000 slum dwellings and the building of over 15,000 council houses, an issue that he became passionate about after seeing the living conditions of some of his Holbeck parishioners. The Housing Act of 1930 required councils to prepare slum clearance plans but the re-housing of displaced communities was to prove a hot political issue.

A delegation from Leeds had visited Vienna in 1932 and been much impressed by the Karl Marx-Hof, Red Vienna’s socialist housing showpiece. They also visited an estate at Cite de la Muett at Drancy in France which laid claim to a revolutionary new building technique that had been developed by architect Eugene Mopin. The Mopin system used a light steel frame, encased in pre-cast concrete units, which were then filled with concrete. Floors, walls and ceilings were constructed from prefabricated concrete blocks, made in a factory on the site. As the building was erected in stages, it did not require scaffolding. The system also eliminated the need for brickwork and plastering, so there was no need to employ a skilled labour force. All this meant that there were big savings in materials time and labour costs, which made the scheme very economical and thus attractive to city planners.


Jenkinson commissioned Mopin to come up with the structural design for the Leeds project and enlisted R.A.H. Livett the then Director of Housing and later City Architect for Leeds to formulate the overall design. Originally it was proposed that the complex would contain 800 flats in total, but after a number of revisions the height of the building was increased to eight storeys and the number of flats to 938. Livett's original designs were ambitious, they incorporated shops, a nursery, laundries, a community hall complete with a stage and dressing rooms, recreational facilities including and play areas, indoor and outdoor swimming pools, courtyards and gardens. The flats were the first municipal scheme in the Britain to have lifts and there were further innovations in a centralised waste disposal system and even a mortuary for laying out the dead! Not all of these grand designs however were to end up in the final plan; building got underway in 1934 and the first homes were ready for their new tenants in 1938. The flats themselves were impressive for the time and full of mod-cons. Each had a living room, scullery and a bathroom with between one to five bedrooms. In the absence of a garden each had a balcony and a window box. China cupboards, airing cupboards, fitted wardrobes, baking ovens were included and all flats had electric lighting.  As one early tenant recalls, “Where I lived in Horsforth we only had an outside toilet and no bathroom so the new flats seemed really posh!”


It is with some sadness that the dream of building a model community at Quarry Hill never really materialised. The building, though to many an improvement on what was there before, suffered from the pre-fabricated nature of its construction and there were on-going problems with maintenance and vandalism. The lack of community cohesion and feelings of isolation expressed by some former residents meant its flaws as a social project began to show through very quickly. In 1973, the decision was taken to re-house the tenants and demolish the flats, only forty years after they were built. By the time this newsreel was made, the majority of flats were already demolished.


Quarry Hill still lives on in popular memory as Queenie’s Castle (a popular YTV sitcom that ran from 1970-72 starring Diana Dors and soon to be Coronation street regular Lynne Perrie which was filmed there) and its true legacy has become something of a contentious issue. It is often characterised as either poorly-funded, failed utopian dream or hair-brained folly demonstrating the worst excesses of some failed brand of socialism. What is certain is that this area of Leeds will continue to be the focus of much attention in the coming years. The £650 million Victoria Gate retail development currently under construction near Kirkgte Market is nearing its final stages and the planned second phase to develop Eastgate will transform the area still further. The equally imposing building that now occupies the land where Quarry Hill once stood Quarry Hill House was completed in 1993 and built to house the Dept of Work and Pensions. This modern somewhat brutalist building has itself become a now familiar landmark particularly for visitors arriving in Leeds on the York train. Known to many locals as ‘the Kremlin’ or ‘The Minstry of Truth’ due to its rather austere façade it still dominates the view towards Eastgate from the Headrow and is as loved and loathed as any other in the ever-chaging Leeds skyline.


References
Schofields on Wikipedia: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schofields_%28department_store%29
Schofields on Leodis
Leeds Bus Strike reported in commercial Motor
Secret Leeds on the Bus Strike
Municipal Dreams website on Quarry Hill
Leodis on Quarry Hill
Housing market website on Quarry Hill
Council Housing on Wikipedia