13th March, 2024 in Local & Family History

Rediscovering the lost back-to-back terraces of Woodhouse in Leeds in the 1960s and 70s

By Colin James

By Elizabeth James

Authors Colin and Elizabeth give us the back story of how they collected the photographs for their new book The Lost Back-to-Back Streets of Leeds: Woodhouse in the 1960s and 70s. Featuring nearly 140 of those photographs in black and white, plus some 30 more in full colour.

We have a big collection of photographs, taken by Colin in the Leeds suburb of Woodhouse in the late 1960s and early 70s when we were students. He was also a very keen photographer, with ready access to the darkroom facilities in the University students’ Union. Woodhouse, and many similar suburbs, was currently on the cusp of major changes; extensive housing redevelopment would soon replace its densely packed back-to-back terraces of houses.

Woodhouse is very close to the University and those very terraces and their shops and street life attracted the student photographer’s attention. Woodhouse did indeed change greatly as the years passed, and those photographs turned into a fascinating archive of a particular period in its history.

The Lost Back-to-Back Streets of Leeds: Woodhouse in the 1960s and 70s presents nearly 140 of those photographs in black and white, plus some 30 more in full colour. Together they recapture the flavour of what was for some years a permanent state of flux, widespread elsewhere in the city as well, as whole streets became derelict, for a while vanished completely and were rebuilt in a new form. The story the pictures tell begins with houses and residents of all ages, shops, washing lines across the street, nice old gas lamps still in use. Later they start to illustrate aspects of the redevelopment.

Half a century on, a certain amount of background history needed to be told to frame them. Although we were on the spot at the time, we felt today that we really knew very little about the background to those changes. Our necessary research for the book was as thorough as possible but limited by our present geographical distance from Leeds. We have let the pictures themselves tell the story, amplified by background text only as necessary.

This text was put together from three major sources: the West Yorkshire Archives, the resources available at Leeds Local History Library, especially their well-indexed local newspapers, and topographical fieldwork in the streets themselves. Our bookcase held a vital gold nugget: the 1960s street atlas of Leeds which had accompanied Colin on his photographic rambles. Photocopies of the relevant pages went with us on new explorations.

We found that the new houses stand in streets preserving the old names, but today they often follow a different course! Puzzlement led to many conversations with people who often up to find out if we needed directions, because we were standing on street corners looking around us with a map in hand; they became interested in what we were doing and stayed to chat. On our first visit to the West Yorkshire Archives Service in Nepshaw Lane, we really did get lost: Nepshaw Lane, like Caesar’s Gaul, is divided into three parts and we were in the wrong one, as the postman kindly explained.

The Archives were a mine of information. Much of our background information had been preserved by the surveyors making pre-redevelopment reports. They recorded the residents – some of them young but some elderly couples had lived in their house for anything up to 60 years, during which they had accepted their homes’ limitations as the norm. Many had probably been born and grown up in similar properties.

Many had no bath and shared a toilet with neighbouring houses. In 1970 we went to a “pre-demolition” party at a friend’s house. He had a bath – it was under a worktop in the kitchen – but party-goers were given directions to the toilet, starting with “Go out of the front door and turn left . . .” (I do wonder how far that advice affected the consumption of liquid refreshment at the party.) Many people in fact had modernised their houses by converting a bedroom into a bathroom. There had been a scheme some fifteen years before which provided grants for this, but strictly as a temporary measure to allow time for the full redevelopment.

Sometimes surveyors found an old Victorian kitchen range, perhaps just a survival but occasionally still in use and of questionable safety; some even found traces of a former cellar kitchen. Tucked in among the pages were occasional press cuttings or even letters from residents, with interesting snippets of information: some of those we went on to quote, but we decided firmly that at no point would we mention individuals by name. We applied the same principle to features and letters in the Yorkshire Evening Post, a vital source of contemporary opinion. We were in no position, decades on, to ask the writers’ permission.

Some people were keen to move on to good household facilities and the hope of a garden, but many recognised the impending loss of more than just an old house. With no other outside recreation space, a great deal of time was spent out in the street, hanging out washing and talking with neighbours and passers-by, perhaps just sitting on the doorstep, as people are doing in some of our pictures. It would be many years before the less obvious effects of a break-up of distinct communities was recognised.

Woodhouse as it is today, old and new, is still somewhere we took great pleasure in discovering and exploring and new photographs of it appear in the book as well. Some of its streets of back-to-back houses still stand, as they do elsewhere in Leeds, much loved by those who live in them. Colin never thought of those photographs when he took them as history in the making: the area intrigued him because it was different from where he had grown up. We hope that out there are people who might want to discover those lost streets for themselves, perhaps because they or their parents or grandparents once lived there. We hope that the story which starts with these pictures will help them do that.