3 ms·

I know the Victorians loved to exaggerate the scale of their monuments... but even so that image of the town hall takes the cake!

• osrec 3y ago
  It actually is quite a grand building (I was born in Leeds!) See https://www.expedia.co.uk/Leeds-Town-Hall-Leeds-City-Center.d6082797.Attraction https://www.expedia.co.uk/Leeds-Town-Hall-Leeds-City-Center....
• PaulRobinson 3y ago
  Civic buildings built in the 18th and 19th centuries in Britain are considerably more impressive than their contemporary equivalents anywhere else in the World, thanks to the British Empire being at its peak at that time.
  • eigenket 3y ago
    While that's true and Leeds Town Hall does look a fair bit like the picture it's definitely quite significantly smaller https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_Town_Hall https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leeds_Town_Hall
  • graemep 3y ago
    I am not convinced you can attribute it to the Empire, a lot of it was in industrial towns that probably gained more from the industrial revolution than the Empire. The other difference is greater civic pride, and a different sense of aesthetics among the people who made the decisions. In absolute terms all those towns with nice old civic buildings are much richer than they were in the 19th century - but any new buildings are almost guaranteed to be hideous.
    • PaulRobinson 3y ago
      Civic pride is a curious thing in 19th century Britain. To get into it would be a small essay on the 1832 parliamentary reform act and all the factors that contributed to it. But Empire was important. There was more money concentrated in fewer British hands than ever before, or ever since. "Empire" is also a broad term: the Industrial Revolution, originating in the Midlands; steam power, which was exported globally; and of course, the slave trade, which Britain both catalysed and then worked hard to destroy. They all had their part - they were drivers and benefactors of Empire, and they all put plenty of cash into a few well meaning citizens' pockets.
  • vundercind 3y ago
    Part of it may be the empire thing, but in the US even small town post offices from 1920 or earlier are luxurious by modern standards. We’d never ever spend what it’d take to build them like that now. Small towns that didn’t have a town hall or courthouse or other civic buildings built by the 1930s or so tend to have government structures that look like (or are in!) strip malls. Or look like cheap funeral homes. We’re “way richer now” but all our nice buildings are from when we were “poor”. That even goes for commercial and industrial buildings. The stock of nice 5-15 story brick buildings that can be renovated into attractive apartments is basically fixed (actually, declining), because we don’t build anything that attractive and durable anymore. Similarly, it’s sometimes worrying how much of the very-nice infrastructure in our parks (state and national, both) was built by 1930s “New Deal” programs and hasn’t seen more than maintenance since. These are treasures we still enjoy today and we haven’t seriously invested in more of them in most of a century.
• Kognito 3y ago
  The proportions seem a little off but it is hand drawn.