On 20 December I spent a weekend in Leeds. The city is the third largest in the UK (after
London and Birmingham) but this agglomerative accolade is as much the outcome
of cookie-cutter administrative boundaries than any geographical fact. It is a regional centre for banking and
retail, along with significant remnants of its once dominant role in
manufacturing. On the recommendation of
a friend I decided to stay at the Queens Hotel, an eerie Art Deco building
dating from 1937, because I had been given a small task to complete: to
photograph the hotel ballroom. The
ballroom of the Queens Hotel has a distinctive place in the music culture of northern
England — during the late 1970s many bands performed there— but what is the
venue like now? I finally set out to
complete my task on the Sunday morning but immediately found that the pathway
to the room was staffed by succession of stewards for the LIFE Church, a
recently founded religious organization based in Bradford, with branches in
Leeds, Belfast, and most recently Warsaw.
As an agnostic atheist I felt rather like an imposter edging my way ever
closer to the room; as I neared the entrance someone tried to hug me, I was
clearly entering an alien spiritual domain.
The room was filled with a glittering darkness of acoustic guitars and
biblical incantations; an imaginary post-industrial nirvana far removed from the
sound and fury of the past.
Ballroom of the Queens Hotel, Leeds, 21 December 2014
