Quarry House

Killing time in Leeds, waiting to be picked up by Peter & Lesley from outside the Yorkshire Playhouse. This is the first time I have been up close and personal with Quarry House, an astonishingly ill-judged lump of architecture that I have stared at from trains and cars many times before.

The good citizens of Leeds refer to this as The Kremlin, and sometimes as The Ministry of Truth. Terry Farrell had sketched a master-plan for the redevelopment of the Quarry Hill flats, leaving a space for a flagship building, and then Building Design Partnership came up with this impersonal monolith, straight out of Flash Gordon. The Department of Health and Social Security relocated their HQ to here.