North Concourse Leeds City Station, 1998

This project was designed and delivered by Simon and Jonathan whilst Directors of careyjones architects and was undertaken for Railtrack through an agreement with developer Teesland. It comprised the refurbishment of the Listed Art Deco Concourse, together with new build retail units and parking facilities.

The North Concourse was originally completed in 1939 and linked the LNER and LMS stations together whilst also providing access to the adjacent Queens Hotel. The architectural style was uncompromisingly Art Deco with elaborate fibrous plaster mouldings to ceiling and wall panels along with bronze framed display cases and bespoke light fittings.

With the construction of the South Concourse in the early 1960's and passenger circulation focusing on this new facility the North Concourse became largely redundant used only as a car park for executive rail travellers. Given its relatively short life to effective decommissioning little maintenance work was undertaken on the North Concourse leaving the vast majority of original Art Deco features completely intact.

The scheme proposed saw the North Concourse brought back to life by making it once again a major entrance to the station through the re-opening of the City Square entrance and creation of a new entrance to the new passenger drop-off. The potential daily footfall of 50,000 rail users was seen as a driver for the provision of additional retail units and working with the existing features many of the original bronze framed display cases were refurbished and used to create shop frontages to these new units.

Where possible the original specialist contractors who had worked on this building in the 1930's were invited back to undertake the refurbishment works. This included such organisations as Luxcrete who supplied the glass roof-lights and Drawn Metal who produced the bronze decorative cases and frames. Other features such as the art deco pendant lights had to be carefully removed from site, dismantled and rebuilt to meet modern electrical and safety standards whilst also maintaining an identical outward appearance.

The success of this painstaking level of restoration work has been underlined by the various awards that have been achieved over the years including the Leeds Award for Architecture (Altered Building) as well as the National Railway Heritage Awards, London Underground Award in 1999.