The Leeds printA Leeds print in a dark frame, on a pale stone-coloured wall, in even northern light.0.707

Maps · Collection 01

Leeds print, drawn from the real map

53.7975°N / 1.5436°W · United Kingdom

The heaviest line on this map is a collar, and it stops halfway: there is no southern half. Everything else converges on a centre small enough to miss on a first look.

You choose the framing, the palette and the words of the caption. The work is drawn from real data, then printed to order in the workshop closest to you.

Compose my Leeds print

What the map shows

A collar that stops halfway, and a corridor of water and rail

That collar is a motorway, and it is worth knowing what it looks like on the ground, because the map and the street disagree. It runs in a cutting six metres deep with vertical walls, so from the pavement you can walk past it without noticing. On paper it is the boldest thing in the city. It goes round the north and east and no further, and the reason is simply that the river corridor already occupies the south.

Read on

That corridor is the older subject. River, canal and railway lie down together in the same narrow strip, and the station sits in it rather than beside it. Two things follow. This is not Manchester, where the water was cut wide enough for ocean ships; Leeds holds onto the sea through a made-navigable river and a narrow canal. And the regularity you see is all in the suburbs: the brick grids of the Victorian districts are far more ordered than the medieval centre they surround, which is a tangle of two streets and their yards.

Compose your own

What suits Leeds

The palette

Red brick for the enormous Victorian belt, and Yorkshire stone, blond and lighter, for the small centre and the civic buildings: the print works when those two are clearly different rather than blended into one brown. The Aire corridor wants a dark horizontal, water and iron together, because it is the line that holds the page up. If you mark the ring road, let it read as a cut rather than an avenue. Keep the green at the edges: this is the opposite of a city of parks, and moving green inwards would be a lie.

The framing

Vertical, though the city lies along its valley, and framed tightly enough that the collar keeps its shape. That is the one hard rule here. Pull back and the tiny medieval centre disappears into the brick, the collar shrinks to a scribble, and the radial roads stop reading as a spider. Roundhay Park is three miles north of this frame and stays out of it; going to fetch it costs you the whole structure of the drawing.

The caption

The title, a line beneath it, the coordinates. A street off Briggate, a mill, a date: that line is what turns a plan of Leeds into your plan of Leeds.

What the drawing tells

Three dates that explain the city

1699A river was made to work

In May 1699 Parliament authorised the improvement of the rivers Aire and Calder, and the purpose was stated plainly: to get the cloth of Leeds and Wakefield out to market. Within a few years the Aire was navigable up to the town. That is the first link in a chain that would give an inland Yorkshire cloth town an outlet to the North Sea, and it is why the corridor along the bottom of this map, rather than any square or church, is the oldest working thing on the sheet.

1816A canal from one sea to the other, after forty-six years

The Leeds & Liverpool Canal was authorised in 1770 and finished in 1816, forty-six years later: a hundred and twenty-seven miles, the longest canal in the country built as a single undertaking. Joined to the Aire & Calder, it completed an inland waterway that crossed the whole of northern England, from the Irish Sea to the North Sea. At Leeds it arrives in the same narrow corridor as the river, at the foot of the station, which is why three kinds of transport from three centuries are lying side by side in one strip of ground.

1964The first British city to drive a motorway through itself

An inner road was proposed in 1955 to relieve a central crossroads carrying more than forty per cent through traffic, given motorway status in 1963, and built between 1964 and 1975. Two carriageways of 7.3 metres, sunk in a cutting six metres deep with vertical walls, looping the centre while staying almost invisible from the street. Leeds was proud enough of it to take it as a slogan and print it on its post: Motorway City of the Seventies. It is the boldest line on this print and the one you would least notice if you were standing there.

Before ordering

The four questions people ask

Can I choose any place, any date?

Yes. The search covers the whole world, from a capital to a hamlet. For the Sky collection, any date works, past or future: the sky is calculated.

What sizes do you offer?

From 21 × 29.7 cm to 84.1 × 118.9 cm, that is A4 to A0, portrait or landscape depending on the material. Every size is shown with its price in the editor.

What materials do you offer?

Four, from the barest to the most dressed.

Matte fine art paperA 200 gsm art paper with a deep matte finish: the bare print, to frame as you please.
Wooden hangersThe print suspended between two wooden hangers, ready to hang, in the spirit of studio posters.
The classic frameThe print mounted under acrylic glass in a slim frame, assembled by hand, delivered ready to hang.
Framed canvasThe piece printed on canvas, stretched over a wooden stretcher bar and set in a frame: a gallery presence.

How long does it take?

Allow 1 to 4 working days for making, up to 7 for hand-assembled frames and canvases, then 1 to 6 working days in transit with standard delivery.

Digital editions are available immediately: the file of your piece is emailed to you as soon as you order.

All the questions

Your Leeds

The road in from your side of the city, the bridge over the cutting you crossed twice a day, the yard behind the street that nobody else knew about. The valley is the same for everyone. The way in is not.

Compose my Leeds print