Light at the end of the tunnel

Entrances shape our experience of a place, and in Leeds, Neville Street is a gateway that falls short of the promise the city offers. This busy street and road tunnel is used daily by thousands of people. It runs between the regeneration areas south of the city – Beeston and Holbeck – and the centre of the main retail and business district of Leeds. It’s also dark, inhospitable and noisy, and forms a forbidding physical barrier between the city centre core and the fast developing area to its immediate South. This barrier has an immediate impact on local businesses, and a knock-on impact on outlying residential communities. The potential value of this street and its influence on local communities has not gone unnoticed. To its south, Holbeck Urban Village is where the kingpins of the flax industry made their mark and where the new creative and digital industries are now making theirs. Victorian industrialists built factories there and invested in new technology, creating employment and lasting landmarks. They used architecture to establish their brands, competing for the tallest, the most exotic or the biggest, modelled on other great civilisations. They recognised the value of investing in statement design.
The railway arches crossing Neville Street, damaged by fire only 23 years after completion, and repaired in only five days, raised the bar for Victorian engineering. Nicknamed the ‘dark arches’, they were vital to the local industry. More recently they, too, have seen a change in fortune. Before work began here in June 2008, pedestrians ploughed through, avoiding eye contact. The problems were clear, but structurally little could be changed, because the road is beneath the railway line of Leeds station. With investment from Leeds City Council, Yorkshire Forward and the Northern Way, the solution will be unveiled in February 2009. The design team, led by Bauman Lyons Architects, turned to engineers and, less typically, to acoustics specialists Arup. To help change perceptions and create a contemporary landmark, they also commissioned Berlin-based sound and light artist Hans Peter Kuhn and Leeds-based graphic designers Andy Edwards and Alex Prokop.
 

Kuhn’s lighting scheme, involving thousands of LED lights, will change daily. He will also create a subtle sound composition that reacts intuitively, helping to balance the noise inside the tunnel. His other installations, in cities such as New York and Liverpool, have given people a reason to care about a place again. He comments that “The satisfaction with working in the public domain is with the fact that people who would not dare to put a foot into a museum or gallery have the chance to be confronted with something they would otherwise never get in touch with.” With an estimated 13,000 people using the street daily, footfall is already on a par with flagship galleries. On the opposite wall, Edwards and Prokop’s lighting scheme, inspired by the idea of counter-flow, creates patterns of LED lights that will appear to speed up or slow down depending on how fast the passenger moves past them. In effect, cars entering the tunnel will be coerced into slowing down. As work nears completion, we’re confident that the revitalised entrance can help to regenerate the local community. ‘Light’ Neville Street symbolises the transition of the area it serves, and from 2009 will send a powerful message that change is possible. It will also provide a reason for people to come back and experience this richly historic part of the city in a whole new light.