“Some people lose their sense of proportion, I had lost my sense of scale.” Will Self. Re-scaling a block of flats as a chest of drawers was so logical for the Urban Myths series it was only a matter of time before it materialised. I settled on doing a block from Quarry Hill flats. A dominant feature of the architecture of Leeds until it’s demolition in 1978, it holds a strange, dark symbolism for all that remember the building. For myself its memory is a direct tunnel to my childhood. I was deeply affected by a photography exhibition of work by Peter Mitchell chronicling its demolition and it was these pictures I used to work from.

Quarry Hill flats was a large housing estate built on continental lines and peculiar to Leeds. The largest and most modern of their kind in Europe, housing around 3000 people, the flats were constructed during the 1930’s as part of a great social experiment to accommodate an entire urban community. But soon the daring vision for the future began to crumble – literally – and by the 1950’s the flats were infamous. During the 1970’s the decision was made to demolish the “concrete jungle”.

On the site where the awesome project stood now stand the West Yorkshire Playhouse. The odd step and hand railing remains today, confused echoes, fragmented through time that trigger memories in those from the cities old enough to remember the buildings dark majesty.

Ferro concrete was to the 1930’s almost what nuclear power was to the 1960’s, the portentous promise of economy, strength and cleanliness combined. The Mopin system involved a factory being built on the site where the prestressed concrete slabs were made and these slotted together to form the structure. The lifts worked well, unlike the successes of the 60’s and70’s, but the real innovation of the Garchey automatic waste disposal system gradually clogged up, proving horrendously costly and difficult to clean. But above all the revolutionary Mopin system of the prefabricated blocks of stressed steel and concrete proved defective and poor welding led to seepage of water and rust resulted that weakened the whole structure. By the early 1960’s the brave new structure needed repairs more costly than a complete new building. So demolition followed.

Quarry Hill Flats were always there through my childhood and their demolition marked my coming of age. They overlooked the centre of Leeds and the bus station and as we had no car this was always how I entered and left the city with my Mum on shopping trips or with my Dad on expeditions to go fishing, watching Rugby League or collecting birds eggs. It was an awesome black, bleak terrifying slum and you didn’t enter unless you had to. Gangs roamed around looking to vandalise. By then it was deep into decay and many residents had been re-housed, the odd valiant tenants clung on protected by large vicious dogs and painted warnings to the gangs of kids that came to smash up and urinate in vacated flats, burn out cars, start fires or throw bottle after bottle from the balconies until the glass mounds banked up like driven snow. In its final days my mother was in St James Hospital and each night after school me and my brother or sister would get the bus to the green bus station, walk past the flats and up to the hospital. Then after visiting time, walk back past the grim black curve to get the bus home. The demolition of the flats began during my mother’s last months and the two processes are entwined in my memory. The shadow of the great curve, the formidable form of the complex that faced the city cast a shadow that stretched and the ground never caught the sun from the 1930’s to the end of the 1970’s. I remember the shrieks and screams echoing around the dieing building and the slamming of doors as youth vandalised any remaining dignity its walls still held as cancer was doing the same to my mother.