Chapter III – part two: A large town

The second study-Headingley

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The other area considered was Headingley, some two miles northwest of the city centre. By contrast with the haphazard development of Allerton, Headingley has a clear plan with a large and well-established centre, including about one hundred shops, five banks, and a parish church. Originally Headingley was a village on the main road to Otley and Ilkley, but in Victorian times it developed as a suburb of Leeds. The development was of two kinds. On the north-east side of the Otley Road, an area was developed of large houses with substantial gardens. On the south-west side, development tended to be of small terraced houses, and has now been consolidated with suburban semi-detached houses. The old village became, and remains, a good-quality shopping centre.

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We confined our study to the area of small houses lying between Otley Road and the railway line to the south-west. It has a population of 8,000 and is bordered to the north by St. Anne’s Road, and extends southwards to include Chapel Lane. The low density part of Headingley was excluded because the environmental problems there (if any) are less urgent than elsewhere. Figure 140 shows the boundaries of the area, the focal points of local movement, and a sub-division into possible environmental areas.

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Local traffic movements are concentrated on the Otley Road. This is a main radial road of the city which also serves numerous offshoots into adjoining suburban areas, of which Headingley is one. It passes right through the Headingley shopping centre, where its traffic produces a major environmental conflict.

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In addition to locally generated traffic, the area is adversely affected by substantial cross-flows of traffic filtering through in various directions. One of the causes of this filtration is that drivers are seeking to avoid the congestion on the Otley Road where it passes through the Headingley shopping centre. Another is the existence of a bridge over the railway at Kirkstall Lane which attracts traffic through Headingley much of it through the shopping centre. The location of the county cricket and rugby football grounds in the area also has a drastic, though intermittent, effect, when the locality is invaded by spectators from all directions.

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Figure 142 shows some ideas for environmental management on similar lines to the Allerton area. Headingley is a compact area, where walking to local shops and schools can be expected to remain an important means of movement. In addition to making pedestrian movements safer an important object of environmental management would be to encourage more pedestrian movements by the creation of a footpath system serving the school and the shopping area. The suggestions we make would not produce the high level of environmental conditions which could be achieved in areas of new housing development, but they would affect a notable improvement by sorting out the present mixture of pedestrian and vehicular movements.

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In outlining these ideas we have had to pre-suppose the temporary adaptation of the Otley Road as a primary distributor, with a by-pass to the Headingley shopping centre to be converted later into a service road for the shops. This would be absolutely essential for the up-grading of the environment of the shopping centre. Also, in order to eliminate through traffic in Kirkstall Lane, it would be necessary to extend St. Anne’s Road to the railway bridge (as proposed in the development plan). The frontage development in St. Anne’s Road makes it unsuitable as a distributor road, and we have shown a new line slightly further south. This coincides with the boundary of an environmental area. Given these two capital works, it would be possible to make a serious start with the environmental management of the area. West of the railway a new radial distributor (which is one of the links appearing in our main network study) would in due course enable proper access to be provided to the football and cricket grounds. Figure 143 shows the manner in which the Headingley area would relate to the fully-developed primary network.

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New traffic access to the Headingley shopping area could be facilitated by some redevelopment to provide rear servicing for goods deliveries and customers’ car parking. The shopping centre itself is shown converted to pedestrian use only. There is in fact scope for several quite different arrangements whereby pedestrian and vehicle movements can be separated, depending on the amount of redevelopment envisaged and the routes which bus services use to approach the centre. Lastly it will be seen that the ideas set out provide for the development of an independent network of pedestrian ways leading to the shopping area. The area as a whole is compact enough for this kind of pedestrian movement to be provided for.

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We do not suggest that environmental management can always be started without some expenditure on capital works. This is demonstrated by the Headingley example, but there will be very many areas where, given modest expenditure, a real start could be made on squeezing out the extraneous traffic onto potential distributor roads, and re-organising internal circulations in order to reduce the impact of traffic as it has now developed, and as it is getting worse every day. We think there is a promising technique here which would repay further study and development.