Adding colour to the city: responding to different histories in a Victorian city required boldness, not reticence, to complement the existing.

The site of Allford Hall Monaghan Morris's Cloth Hall Street development in the centre of Leeds--57 apartments around a central raised court, with commercial space at street level--is one familiar to generations of students at the city's school of architecture. Cleared in the 1960s and turned into an untidy car park, it provided excellent raw material for innumerable student projects, but proved resistant to real-life redevelopment proposals until swept up by the ongoing regeneration of the Leeds riverside and adjacent eastern fringes of the city centre. AHMM's proposals were selected in 2000 after a limited competition organised by the developer.

The roughly triangular (and sloping, in two directions) Conservation Area site was both awkward and potentially intimidating. Cuthbert Brodrick's magnificent, boldly detailed 1860s Corn Exchange, now a specialist shopping centre, stands immediately to the north, with the extravagant Kirkgate Market beyond. To the west, Call Lane, an ancient street running down to the River Aire, contains a run of historic frontages, several of which had to be incorporated into the new development. In 1866-69, the Victorian railway builders drove the final link in the Leeds-York line across Call Lane and straight through White Cloth Hall to the east, leaving only fragments of the original Georgian structure. The heavily used rail viaduct defines the southern perimeter of the site, cutting it off from the riverside.

Although the notorious 'Leeds Look', a local derivative of the pervasive commercial Post-Modernism of the 1980s, is now history, city planners had a potentially prescriptive vision for the development of the site. The height of the scheme was limited to the parapet height of the Corn Exchange, with a set-back top floor conceived as a lightweight metal and glass pavilion. There was a strong preference for red brick as a cladding material, with the elevation facing the Corn Exchange given a concave form in deference to Brodrick's building, forming a sharp point at the junction with Call Lane. A run of Victorian buildings on Call Lane was to be largely retained and converted as part of the scheme--the proposed demolition of the northernmost of these buildings was firmly resisted by the planners and it too has been retained as something more than a token facade.

The element of horse-trading inevitably attached to the process of developing in sensitive historic contexts has, however, in this instance produced a new building which has a vigour extending beyond mere contextualism. One key move was the introduction of panels of glazed faience, in a subtle progression of colours, into the facades. The local authority was initially unenthused by the idea but, as the architects point out, there are plenty of precedents for the use of the material in the centre of Leeds--indeed, the Burmantofts factory, just down the road, supplied terracotta and faience for building projects across Britain into the 1950s. The factory closed in 1957: AHMM was obliged to source the material from France. A matt brick of good quality provides the basic frame for the street elevations. Facades to the internal court are simply rendered. The details, says AHMM, are 'robust', designed to cope with the exigencies of a design and build contract. The completed building looks at home in its context of nineteenth-century commercial and industrial architecture, though its chequerboard elevations break with the more formal geometry of the latter, more rigidly defined by structural bays.

The centre of Leeds, like those of other major British cities, is awash with new residential developments aimed squarely at affluent youngish professionals. The Cloth Hall Street scheme has no parking and the apartments are small (typically 70sqm), targeted at singles and couples likely to frequent the many restaurants, bars and clubs in the vicinity. An element of social housing was a planning requirement. Inevitably, this was placed along the railway viaduct, though the fall in the site means that all apartments in this block have clear views across the tracks.

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The plan form of the apartments, highly economical and compact, derives clearly from AHMM's earlier social housing projects, including work for the Peabody Trust. Access is via open walkways along the courtyard elevations, a device all too familiar from the world of public sector housing but saleable here in the context of a secure, contained environment. People of a nervous disposition, or those requiring a tranquil environment, are unlikely, in any case, to settle here, at the heart of the '24 hour city'.

For all the dynamism of the current Leeds residential development scene, the architectural consequences have been too often mundane if not banal. As a London-based (albeit Sheffield-trained) practice, AHMM has broken the mould. The outcome of a tense but, in the end, fruitful dialogue with local planners. Cloth Hall Street offers an alternative to the high-rise apartment towers that increasingly disfigure the banks of the River Aire. Beyond that, it seems to offer a vision for a pragmatic new urban vernacular, in tune with history and with a real sense of place.

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