The Essay: Looking at Leeds

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The Essay: Looking at Leeds: Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig

Looking at Leeds

BBC Radio 3 - The Essay, Looking at Leeds, Ian Duhig

Ian Duhig takes us on a virtual poetic journey along Blind Jack Metcalf's road.

The city of Leeds seen through public art - past, present and future. Ian Duhig takes us on a virtual poetic journey along Blind Jack Metcalf's road due north out of the city.

In his essay, Paradoxopolis, Ian Duhig is inspired by a painting by 'Leeds’s Lost Modernist', the reclusive Joash Woodrow, and the former local synagogue, now the Northern School of Contemporary Dance, both sited on the road north out of Leeds, built by Blind Jack Metcalf, iconic Leeds roadmaker of the Victorian era. 

Ian says: "When I first moved here about 50 years ago, Leeds was still advertising itself as The Motorway City of the Seventies and as much as its natural resources of clay and coal, its central location between London and Scotland. and England’s east and west coasts, was a major influence on its development. Immigrants, itinerant labour and roadmakers have built this city and its economy, something I propose to show by inviting you all to join me now on a virtual poetic journey through it on one road, Blind Jack Metcalf’s due north where we will come to understand something of that extraordinary civil engineer and what Virginia Woolf meant when she once wrote in a TLS review: “Personally, we should be willing to read one volume about every street in the city, and should still ask for more”.

The essay touches on the many different populations that have lived and still live in Leeds - Jewish, Irish, Caribbean, Indian, Russian, Polish, Portuguese and their rich cultural manifestations. 

Ian Duhig became a full-time writer after working with homeless people for fifteen years. He has published eight collections of poetry, held several fellowships including at Trinity College Dublin, won the Forward Best Poem Prize once, the National Poetry Competition twice and been shortlisted four times for the T.S. Eliot Prize. His New and Selected Poems was awarded the 2022 Hawthornden Prize for Literature. He is currently finishing his next book of poetry, ‘An Arbitrary Light Bulb’, due from Picador in 2024.

Writer/reader, Ian Duhig
Sound designer, Alisdair McGregor
Producer, Polly Thomas

Looking at Leeds is a co-commission between BBC Radio 3 and The Space with funding from Arts Council England.
A Thomas Carter Project for BBC Radio 3.

Live music and the arts: broadcasts more live music than any other radio network. Classical music is its core. Genres include world and new music, jazz, speech and drama.

The city of Leeds seen through its public art - past, present and future.

The city of Leeds seen through its public art - past, present and future - by Leeds writers Mailika Booker, Jeremy Dyson, Michelle Scally Clarke, Ian Duhig and Khadijah Ibrahiim.

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