After a day out in Manchester where we enjoyed the Castlefield Viaduct high-line garden, my friend Ann and I decided to take a day-trip to Leeds to look at the Monk Bridge Viaduct, which turns out to be a closely-guarded secret.
It’s remarkably difficult to find: there seems to be no signage whatsoever, and street maps show where an abandoned railway crosses the River Aire but offer no indication how to approach the elevated former trackbed.
If we’d simply walked out of the station and turned left we’d have found it within a spacious housing development called The Junction. But we’re from Sheffield. How are we supposed to know?
The viaduct is worth seeking out, nevertheless, as a monument to the period when the new-fangled railways embellished their engineering with grand architectural decoration.
From 1834 onwards five separate railway companies converged on the flat land beside the River Aire as near as possible to the centre of Leeds, their approach lines criss-crossing and twisting in a cat’s-cradle over the river and the Leeds & Liverpool Canal.
The Midland Railway opened a terminus, Leeds Wellington Station, in 1846, while the other four companies shared a joint station, Leeds Central Station, in 1854 and built an east-west through line served by Leeds New Station in 1869 (renamed Leeds City in 1938).
In the 1960s British Railways concentrated all its passenger services in Leeds City (renamed simply Leeds) and subsequently Leeds Central was demolished and part of its viaduct approach replaced by Royal Mail House (1975 – reconstructed as West Central, 2003, and later West Point).
The surviving viaduct, including a stately bridge over the River Aire, has now become the spine of The Junction, a very smart residential development geared to people who work from home, and the former trackbed is ingeniously landscaped so that it doesn’t look like a corridor to carry railway lines.
Ann and I parked ourselves at a table in front of The Junc Shack, where a civilised queue of (presumably) residents and workers seemed content to wait for carefully prepared and courteously served food and drinks from Alfonso’s Cuban Shack, where the generously filled pastrami bagel proved to be a substitute for lunch.
On a fine day, within ten minutes’ walk of Leeds Station, The Junction is worth visiting.
If you ask the Junc Shack crew nicely, they’ll show you how to access the splendid loos.