The Art College's Vernon Street Building

Thinking back on my time teaching Foundation studies down in the Vernon Street building, perhaps one of the most important things was the shape and format of the building itself.

Leeds College of Art, Vernon Street, Leeds

Built in 1903 and designed by Bedford and Kitson, it was one of the first iron frame buildings to be put up in the city of Leeds, contrasting powerfully with the Cuthbert Brodrick Mechanics Institute building (now, 2013, Leeds Museum, then, 1970s, the Civic Theatre) which it abuts.  The red brick exterior broken by a wall of glass, (which it must have felt like at the time), sits perfectly into the rear of the yellow grey Yorkshire millstone grit of the Mechanics Institute with its thick walls and solid spreading footprint. Each building is clearly the product of different times and different philosophies, yet  Bedford and Kitson’s building was built only about forty years after Brodrick’s. Their contrasting forms were something I thought I was part of, the art college’s embracement of light and warmth signifying what was different about an art college education. The building seemed new and old at the same time, which was a concept that helped you get a grasp on what good quality was. A quality based on old fashioned values, make it as well as it can be made, make it according to what is known now at this time and it will be long lasting and always feel right. In this case however the two buildings now read as one, they have been there so long that they feel as if they belong together, but they are really two stories; solid Victorian values start to dissolve under the light of Modernism.

You used to enter the building by climbing steps (there is now a ramp for disabled access) these steps in turn taking you up to a platform outside the polished wood and glass entry doors. This entrance the scene of many a year’s end photograph, the platform a stage upon which you could perform the moment of becoming an artist or designer and celebrate entering the profession. As a building it somehow understands that it will be part of ‘rights-of-passage’ ceremonies.  Above which the College of Art mosaic mural by Gerald Moira depicts an almost timeless image of the muses of painting and sculpture looking down on everyone as they enter, a reminder of history and the weightiness of one’s responsibilities to carry on an ancient tradition. On entering the building you step across a black and white mosaic floor and a large space opens up revealing a wide staircase to the right and a ground floor entrance space with classical columns. From this space you can either descend into the workshops below, ascend towards the studios above or enter the library. This was a space to shape the pedagogy of art and design but not perhaps in the way that it was designed to do.

Moira's mural

There are two ways of looking at how the space operated. The first is instrumental the second poetic but I’m not sure if in my mind I can properly separate these. By the time I arrived in the mid 1970s Foundation studies occupied the top floor three studios as well as joint use of a rooftop suite with contextual studies and a mezzanine space on the half floor below, fashion had the whole of the middle floor, the library occupied the ground floor and in the basement there were workshops for wood and jewellery, hosting courses including musical instrument making and furniture making. Over the next ten years foundation would grow to fill the building and the other courses would move either into other buildings or to other colleges.  (The college in those days occupied as it were the two legs of a horseshoe shape, the Mechanics Institute building was at this time hosting the Music College and was the front of the horseshoe; graphics and surface pattern were in the other leg in the old school building)

The large studios on the top floor Vernon Street were purpose built high ceilinged rooms with tall windows facing North and East. Floors of solid thick wooden floorboards with a patina consisting of years of paint and charcoal droppings were walled in by white painted plaster walls, the bottom eight feet of which were usually lined with fibreboard or chipboard. The windows were tall and reached the full height of the studios, with two triangular windows inset into the roof. These studios looked the part and felt like proper art studios. One of the three had however been converted into a wood workshop, thus saving Foundation students having to mix with furniture students below. This hierarchy was quite important at the time and reflected recent historical change. It was important to separate these ‘degree’ students from the ‘trades’ students below who were usually apprentices from local companies. It was as if two worlds existed, and I was one of the few outside of the complementary studies department who moved between both these worlds. (See 20th Nov post) Because I taught printmaking it was thought that engraving should come into my remit, so I used to take Eddy O’Donnell’s engraving students and teach them the print related aspects of the trade alongside foundation students who I was teaching etching.  These ‘trade’ classes were held in the Jacob Kramer College as it was now called because they came under the heading of Further Education, as were lots of other courses including the Foundation Diploma, which although initially the first year of a four year degree experience, was now at risk, cut adrift from the rest and having to survive amongst the ‘riff-raff’.  It did feel like that at times, only the complementary studies staff who worked across all courses really tried to address this issue. A deep seated ‘trade’/’working class’ academic divide still existed in education at this time, (and arguably still does) reflecting social patterns that go to the core of the British psyche and as someone who was an apprentice in a steelworks before going to art college I still feel its reverberations. 

The building had by then (1970s) been carved up and not very sympathetically; the art college as it had been, no longer existing and many of its courses now being taught in the new Polytechnic H block building on Woodhouse Lane. However as foundation expanded to fill the old Vernon Street building ghosts of its former uses started to emerge; for instance the workshops all went back down into the basement and the Fine Art strand of foundation, growing to be almost as large as the whole course was when I arrived, often taking over one of the top floor studios.

The main fine art activity when I arrived was painting, the standing joke was that sculpture was the stuff you fell over when you stepped back to look at the paintings. The light was very good and the aesthetic nature of thinking once students had been through the diagnostic phase and had decided on fine art was dominated by Patrick Oliver, who as a painter thought like a painter, even if he himself believed he could cover all aspects of the fine art discipline. In his thoughts he was of course including his own special territory the welding shed. This was a construction that had been put up between the two legs of the college, in the courtyard behind the Music College and the Civic Theatre. At the back of this one story construction was a forge and the rest of the space consisted of a jumble of metal pieces, oxygen and  acetylene gas cylinders, bits of half welded cars and assorted junk, all perceived in half light, because there were no windows , just a couple of 60 watt bulbs hanging from the ceiling. It was really an environmental piece, like some set from the Brothers’ Quay and it operated as a mythical workshop, a place for Patrick to tell stories in while he smoked endless Park Drives and managed to get himself even dirtier than normal, the grease from metal and sump oil blending beautifully with the nicotine stains. It was in reality a painterly image of what a sculptural workshop should be. It was definitely not fit for purpose in terms of making sculpture, there was no room, every time someone came in to do something you had to move the junk around to find a place to work. Mythically it worked, but practically it didn’t. Which leads me to that other more poetic sense of how the space operated.

Like my writing there was a feeling of a rambling space that was organising itself around different needs and requirements, but not in a very organised way. It sort of happened. Gaston Bachelard’s ‘The Poetics of Space’ is probably the best guide to what was going on. Derek used to conduct a drawing session with the students whereby they had to explore the building, starting at the bottom and working their way up the small spiral staircase which served as an alternative escape route to the main stairway, finally emerging out into the top studio. Derek was a ceramicist and caver and introduced the students to an idea of the building as a network of small caves that opened out into a great cavern as you made your way up towards the surface of the earth. After this experience they would try and visualise the building as if they were tunnelling into a block of stone or clay, many later going on to make objects of their drawing ideas, the negative spaces of their drawings now becoming solids. The spiral staircase could be seen as a backbone, the main stairway as ribs, the small rooms above the main studios as a brain or in my case a sea pilot’s cabin. I had at one time moved the print studio up there and I could sometimes be found steering the building through the night using the etching press star-wheel, guiding it over the roofs of the city. At another time during the first Gulf war students made scud missiles on that roof, filling them with old ink soaked rags from the print room and setting them to burn. (From what I remember Thomas Houseago was one of those students, so we must have drifted in time to the end of the 80s, beginning of the 90s) Those were the last days of an old ethos, a time before health and safety standards and learning outcomes.  Ted Winter was the technician who controlled the workshop on the top floor, in the corner of which was an old lift shaft that had a wooden platform that had to be hauled up by rope. This was really dangerous, the sudden drop as you opened the doors in front of the lift-shaft was awesome and threatened to suck you in. Every-time those doors opened I would fantasise about swinging out on the rope that was used to haul the goods up the shaft. The point is that both the glass clad print-room that led onto the roof and the dark well of the lift-shaft, both seemed to be silent elements in the building’s story, elements that would underpin what it was to work there and elements that would silently shape the things that were and are still made there.

At the top of the main staircase, just before you entered the studios was the principal’s office. This was the heart of the building and had its own toilet. (This eventually became the staff room when the college expanded and the principalship moved to Blenheim Walk) I still have the wooden handle and chain from the toilet, I saved this item from the rubble when the toilet was knocked through to make a larger room, which is I do believe, now hosting student services. But like all rooms in the present day college it will soon be used for something else. I gather the new Ravensbourne College is totally open-plan, you can get spaces converted into a seminar room for one afternoon and to a drawing space the next day. I wonder how memory works in buildings like that? The white noise of now is surely much harder to fix in the head than the quiet sound of today resting on yesterday.

I need to leave to go to an opening soon, an opening that interestingly for me, includes work from ‘Art and Language’, a group that were heavy influences during my time as a DipAD student. Keith Arnatt at one time brought Terry Atkinson over from Coventry to Newport to host a seminar down in Bolt Street. This would have been perhaps 1970/71. At that time I was just getting my head around what it was to be a conceptualist. I found it hard going at the time and an intellectual challenge, so am interested in how I will feel about their stuff now.

So a final image. The old principal’s office had been the staff-room for the foundation staff for several years, but one year it was announced that it was going to be knocked through during the summer and converted, foundation offices would then be on the floor below. This coincided with Steve Carrick’s leaving, he had a job over in Wrexham. I was sorry to see him go as we had known each other ever since he came to my classes at the Swarthmore when he was working as a bus driver. He moved on from those classes to the part-time Fine Art and Craft Course and from there to teaching at the college. He is a very good artist and impish to boot; everyday he used to bring with him an old plastic children’s lunchbox, if I remember rightly it may even have been a ‘My Little Pony’ branded one. In it he would usually have the remains of the previous night’s pasta or similar. As a last gesture before leaving, he decided to superglue said lunchbox to the shelf that had always been its temporary resting place while he was on studio duty. This last gesture was something he wanted to give to the college as a reminder of his time there. This was also one of my last visits to that staffroom, as I was moving into yet another post in the college’s new building. The image for some reason sits there quite powerfully in my memory. In some ways it was a totally stupid thing to do and yet in others it sums up how and why art education is so unpredictable and at its best unsettling. A totally random gesture becomes more than that, because of a few chance other ingredients elevated into something else, into a moment of now that keeps repeating every time I think about it. A gesture that is simply done because it can be done, but perhaps would only be done in that way and remembered in this way, in an old art college building.