Time in Leeds

Experience Leeds city centre early on a midsummer morning & muse on the past, present and future before sharing breakfast
About this Event

An engaging meditation on pace & pulse, continuity & change, minutes & millennia, geology & fashion, founding & dissolution, speeding up & slowing down, starting & finishing, memory & imagination.

As a geographer, I'm endlessly interested in the long-term development of cities – past, present (what makes the place tick?), future.

I’ll draw attention to many elements of the city:

• its clocks and bells
• buildings old and new and how we can tell their age
• features that aim to speed up and slow down our economic and personal lives
• names both famous and less well known who can be linked to these themes

Start near Leeds Minster (exact spot: https://what3words.com/museum.launch.choice) and finish in Millennium Square.

Above: Potts 'turret clocks' were added to Leeds Minster in the 1890s - made in Potts' works a short walk from here. For centuries, church bells alone had marked the passing hours. Clock faces were a relatively late addition.

Why is 'clockwise' the way it is and not in the other direction?

Below: a Potts clock specially made for the Victorian rebuild of the Griffin Hotel on Boar Lane.