The temple of transformations

A giant Victorian palace of industry is now the haunt of zombies. Stephen McClarence talks to the woman giving a new future to Temple Works in Leeds.

Sheep used to graze on its roof, it boasted the world’s biggest room, and its design was inspired by Ancient Egyptian temples... the men who built Temple Works in the heart of Leeds lacked neither ambition nor whimsy.

Now it’s on two national “architecture at risk” lists, is popular with zombies, and has found a feisty champion in Susan Williamson. She’s busily reinventing it as an off-the-wall arts centre, describes it as “the premier ‘dead person’ venue in the North” and will open the front door in a couple of paragraphs.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Temple Works is a bizarre and wonderful building to find in a Leeds back street. Head south-west from the railway station towards the Holbeck area, past an air-conditioning accessories office, a sandwich delivery depot and a lot of nondescript box-architecture, and there it is: a flax-spinning mill built around 1840 with a weaving shed – “the world’s biggest room” – that spreads over two acres.

The shed and its attached offices were modelled on the Temple of Horus at Edfu and a temple at Dendera reputedly built by Cleopatra: a whiff of the Nile near the banks of the Aire. The front is a long, low row of pillars, unfurling into carved lotus flowers, with snakes grinning and writhing and hieroglyphs signalling impenetrable things. Stalking the walls is the hawk-like Horus, god of the sky. It looks like a stately home for a Pharaoh.

One of its chimneys was inspired by an Egyptian obelisk and the 60 or so conical skylights in the weaving shed suggest glass pyramids. I’m half-expecting the ghost of some West Riding Nefertiti as I ring the bell, but instead the door is opened by Susan Williamson, high priestess of Temple Works’ revival.

A consultant with a background in architectural studies and retail design, Susan runs Cornerstone Strategies, a “cultural regeneration practice” that “takes on big, odd projects and makes them work”. She describes herself as “Dogsbody Number One” as she heads a project to secure the future of this Grade One-listed building, most recently used as a distribution centre for Kays Catalogues and now owned by Arndale Properties Ltd.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

The works’ physical condition is causing official concern. It figures on both the Heritage at Risk register compiled by English Heritage and a similar “at risk” list issued last autumn by the Victorian Society, champions of the architecture of Britain’s great imperial age. The concern increased four years ago when one of the front pillars collapsed, tumbling blocks of stone onto the pavement.

Susan, a high-octane, speed-talking Canadian, has harnessed the building’s architecture – and made a virtue of its sense of stark abandonment – to create an “alternative” arts and cultural centre, or, in the trim sort of phrase that comes naturally to her, “a playground for cultural testing”.

She urges potential users to “come down for a prowl and a chat”, so I have. Two things are instantly clear. First, with no heating on a winter morning, it’s colder inside than out. Second, its regeneration represents an altogether more radical kind of “heritage” rescue than the bland, spick-and-span niceness seen elsewhere.

Rooms have been left as they were when the Kays’ workforce moved out in 2004. Wallpaper peels, plaster flakes, walls are daubed with paint, volunteer staff occupy bleak offices. It’s a sort of Post-Industrial Gothic, very edgy, slightly spooky. “We’ve deliberately set out to create something like a horror movie – East German, Stasi, 1962,” says Susan. “We would never want to tidy it all up, make it all heated and lit.” We settle on the term “creative decay”.

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

As an architecture and design lecturer, she has long known about the style of the building, but was unprepared for its reality. “I had no idea what the sense of space would be, and the sense of awe,” she says. “I was completely gobsmacked and utterly thrilled.”

We tour a warren of old boiler rooms, loading bays, a Victorian board room with throne-like chairs, an office with a shelf of Eighties Kays catalogues and a row of hard hats. There are canteens, a first aid room with 1940s nurses’ screens, and rows of toilets. These have provided atmospheric locations – “an unusual and provocative ambience” – for fashion shoots, music videos and TV series, notably Channel Four’s Red Riding and BBC3’s Frankenstein’s Wedding, a “drama and music event” inspired by Mary Shelley’s novel. And “the Socialist Workers Party had their Christmas party here – they were our best-behaved guests”.

We’re joined by Phil Kirby. What’s he do? “I pretended to be writer-in-residence for a long time, but now I’m just around.” As “Dogsbody Number Two”, he reckons the place has “a John le Carre feel”.

The two of them lead tours which have pulled in more than 25,000 visitors over the past two years. Artists rent studios and there’s a revenue-raising programme of cultural events as contemporary and experimental, as underground and fringe, as they come: sound and light spectacles, “techno-nightlife”, art installations, cabaret, performance art and “themed parties” for Goths, punks and zombie-gamers. Zombie-gamers?

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

People agree to be chased by zombies,” says Susan. “We’ve had endless zombies here. We’re the premier ‘dead person’ venue in the North.”

Heritage Lottery applications are going through for repairs and regeneration, but otherwise the Works generates its own income. “We charge at the door and don’t go round crying that the Arts Council doesn’t give us money. We run on a cobweb rather than a shoestring.” We call in on illustrator Steve Hackenbush. A zombie’s head stares impassively from his office desk: “I’ve got a whole torso down there.” He organises “steam punk” events – “Victorian fantasy mixed with the creativity of the Industrial Revolution”. All this a stone’s throw from the Hilton Hotel.

Finally, we take in “the world’s biggest room” – as big as a bus depot, almost completely empty, with a six-second reverberation period and hollow iron pillars that doubled as drainpipes. Sheep once grazed the roof, whose turf covering retained the humidity that kept the flax moist in the vaulted shed below. The sheep were taken up and down in their own lift.

Williamson describes the project as “a labour of love and a labour of faith on the part of the owners”. Is she confident about the building’s future? “I know it can work,” she says. “But the recession and the structural issues have made it more of a challenge, because we haven’t been able to use this very big space. The scaffolding shakes, rattles and sings during heavy wind. But we want people to know that this isn’t a sad, derelict place. It’s thriving, in its own way.”

Hide Ad
Hide Ad

Two workmen in hard hats stride across the floor. One is wheeling a desk chair, the other carries a small table. They put them down over on the far side and one sits down and starts writing. Is this a performance, I wonder? No, says Williamson, it’s two workmen, a chair and a table. I think I believe her. I know I feel cold.

Related topics: