Leeds

Kirkgate Market and the Victorian Arcades

There is a fish stall in Kirkgate Market called Hayes Seafoods that has been selling oysters since 1880, and people queue for them. Locals will tell you that queuing at Hayes is a rite of passage. You eat them standing up, ready-shucked, in a covered market that bills itself as the largest in Europe — around 800 stalls under a Grade I listed roof, drawing over a hundred thousand people a week. It first opened in 1822 as an open-air market, gained its covered halls between 1850 and 1875, and by 1857 was the biggest indoor market on the continent. It has kept the title, more or less, ever since.

The market is the right place to start, because it tells you what kind of city Leeds is: commercial, unfussy, and quietly proud of things it has done for a long time. The 1875 Hall is bookended by Butchers' Row and Fish & Game Row, which are exactly what they sound like. In the middle, the Market Kitchen street-food area does Yorkshire pudding wraps — roast meat and gravy folded into a Yorkshire pudding, which is the sort of idea that could only have come from here — alongside fish and chips, jerk chicken, Indian thali, and a Vietnamese stall called Banh & Mee doing pho and bao buns. Beef pho comes in around £9.50, duck rice around £11. It is cheaper than the arcades, and often better.

It was also, improbably, the birthplace of Marks & Spencer. In 1884 a Polish-Jewish immigrant named Michael Marks set up a stall here called the Original Penny Bazaar. He later took on a partner, Tom Spencer, and the rest is a large slab of British high-street history. There is a clock in the 1904 hall bearing the M&S name, unveiled in 1984 for the centenary, and in 2012 the company came back and opened a stall next to it. The whole global operation started a few yards away, selling odds and ends for a penny.

A short walk from the market are the Victorian arcades, which are the other thing Leeds does properly. The County and Cross Arcades were the grandest of the city's nineteenth-century arcades, begun in 1898 and finished in 1904 — glazed barrel roofs, mosaics, marble, and decorative faïence made at the local Burmantofts Pottery, all designed by Frank Matcham, who was better known for building theatres. The point worth holding onto is that Leeds made the materials its grand buildings were dressed in. The city didn't import its glamour. It fired it in a kiln down the road.

Coloured Glass, Old Pubs and Independent Beer

Next door is the Victoria Quarter, dubbed the Knightsbridge of the North. It was created in 1990 by restoring the old arcades and roofing over Queen Victoria Street with a stained-glass canopy designed by the artist Brian Clarke — on opening, the largest secular stained-glass work in the world. Harvey Nichols arrived in 1996, its first store outside London, five floors and 60,000 square feet, and the Knightsbridge tag stuck. Louis Vuitton and Mulberry are here too. You do not have to buy anything. Standing under the coloured glass costs nothing.

For a drink, the oldest pub in Leeds is Whitelock's Ale House, down a narrow passage called Turk's Head Yard off Briggate. It opened in 1715 as the Turk's Head, in a building that was already a row of cottages from about 1700. John Lupton Whitelock took it on in 1867; in 1895 his son had it remodelled by Waite & Sons, and that scheme — copper, mirrors, tilework — largely survives, which is why it went from Grade II listed to Grade II* in 2022. In the early twentieth century the landlord was a well-known flautist, and the pub drew musicians, journalists and academics. Later regulars included Peter O'Toole, the cricketer Len Hutton, and the writer Keith Waterhouse. John Betjeman called it "the Leeds equivalent of Fleet Street's Old Cheshire Cheese and far less self-conscious, and does a roaring trade. It is the very heart of Leeds." It was given the hundredth Leeds Civic Trust blue plaque in 2008.

If your tastes run newer, North Bar on New Briggate has been going since 1997 and is reputedly the first place in the UK to pour Sierra Nevada, Brooklyn and Erdinger on tap. North Brewing Co grew out of it and opened its own brewery and taproom about half a mile away in 2015. Leeds has form here. Monks were brewing at Kirkstall Abbey from its foundation in 1152, and Joshua Tetley started his brewery in Hunslet in 1822; by 1860 it was the largest in the North of England, and at its peak it employed around a thousand people. The last barrel was drawn on 24 May 2011, after nearly a hundred and ninety years. The headquarters building survives as The Tetley, an arts venue. Modern Leeds has filled the gap with independents — North Brewing, Northern Monk, Kirkstall Brewery, Wilde Child — and become a craft-beer city in its own right.

Dinner, Neighbourhoods and Green Space

For dinner, Ox Club is the one to book. It sits inside Headrow House, a former mill, and cooks over a wood-fired grill imported from the United States. The head chef is Will Campbell. The signatures are a 1kg côte de boeuf, nduja with oysters, and gochujang-glazed crispy pig tails, and it is known for its Sunday roasts. It is in the Michelin Guide, which matters more than usual here, because the city currently has no Michelin star at all. It used to. Michael O'Hare's avant-garde restaurant The Man Behind the Curtain held one on Vicar Lane — olives wrapped in edible cellophane, salt-and-vinegar ox cheek, chocolate pudding with pork rinds — until it closed in 2023 and took the star with it. Leeds has been waiting for another ever since.

Where you stay shapes the trip more than in most cities. The centre around Briggate and the arcades is the obvious car-free base — everything walkable, the station a few minutes away. Call Lane and The Calls, running down toward the River Aire, is the nightlife strip: converted warehouses, cocktail bars, and venues like HiFi that start as bars and turn into clubs as the evening goes on. Lively at weekends. The Northern Quarter around Merrion Street and New Briggate is the more alternative corner — quirky bars, live music, independents, anchored by Belgrave Music Hall & Canteen, The Domino Club and North Bar. And Chapel Allerton, about two miles north, is the quiet option: a residential suburb nicknamed the Notting Hill of the North, with independent shops, galleries, café-bars and brunch spots. Café by day, bar by night, and green space nearby.

The green space is worth a section of its own. Roundhay Park, about three miles from the centre, is over 700 acres and one of the biggest urban parks in the world — free, drawing more than a million visitors a year, with two lakes, streams, sports pitches and specialist gardens. The Monet Garden is modelled on Monet's garden at Giverny; the Alhambra Garden beside it is based on the thirteenth-century Alhambra in Spain. A land train runs up Carriage Drive on weekends and school holidays, roughly every fifteen minutes from about eleven. Beside the park on Princes Avenue is Tropical World, a free-roaming rainforest of butterflies and birds with a desert zone of meerkats and cacti — a reliable indoor option when the Yorkshire weather does what it does.

Museums, Abbey Ruins and the Birth of Film

For a wet afternoon with children, the Royal Armouries down at Leeds Dock is hard to beat. It is the national museum of arms and armour, a £42.5 million purpose-built museum that opened in 1996 on the south bank of the Aire, moving most of the collection out of the Tower of London. Entry is free. There are five galleries, around 5,000 objects on display, and a further collection of over 13,000 firearms transferred from the Ministry of Defence in 2005. There is jousting, live combat, and falconry. The museum is also the reason the old Clarence Dock got redeveloped into what is now Leeds Dock, a waterfront of riverside walks and warehouses.

Three miles northwest, Kirkstall Abbey is one of the most complete monastic ruins in Britain — a twelfth-century Cistercian abbey founded in 1152, set in green parkland with a modern playground alongside and the Abbey House Museum opposite. It hosts farmers' markets, festivals and outdoor film screenings, and the grounds are free to roam.

The history that sticks to Leeds is stranger than the guidebook version. The Frenchman Louis Le Prince came to the city in 1866 and, in October 1888, shot what many regard as the first moving pictures ever made — the Roundhay Garden Scene, filmed at his father-in-law's house, and Traffic Crossing Leeds Bridge. Two years later, in September 1890, he boarded a train from Dijon to Paris on his way to demonstrate the invention in New York, and was never seen again. Nobody knows what happened. A plaque on Leeds Bridge marks the spot where cinema, arguably, began.

Quarry Hill, Getting Here and Armley Writers

Then there is Quarry Hill. From 1938 to 1978 it held Britain's largest social-housing complex, designed by R. A. H. Livett with genuinely radical features for the time — electric lighting, solid-fuel ranges, a French refuse-disposal system, a swimming pool. It went from showpiece to shame and was demolished in 1978. During the demolition a mass grave was found beneath it: the site had been a burial ground during the 1849 cholera epidemic. A government office building and a college campus stand there now.

Getting here is straightforward. Leeds station is one of the busiest in Britain and sits right in the middle of the city, which is the strongest argument for leaving the car at home. If you don't, the M1 and M62 cross to the south-east and the A1(M) runs down the eastern edge. Leeds Bradford Airport is to the northwest, linked to the city station by the A1 Flyer bus in about thirty to forty minutes, roughly £4.50 single and running every twenty minutes or so from before five in the morning to after midnight. In the city, buses are the main way around, run mostly by First Leeds and coordinated by West Yorkshire Metro.

Alan Bennett was born in Armley, and so was the novelist Barbara Taylor Bradford, whose A Woman of Substance sold over thirty million copies. They went to the same primary school. It is a good detail to end on — two of the most-read writers of their generation, learning to read in the same Upper Armley classroom, a mile or two from the market where Marks & Spencer began.