Leeds, drawn from its own streets.

Leeds on paper

The Aire comes in from the west, and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal runs beside it into the basin at the centre — two parallel waters a few hundred metres apart, one wandering and one ruled straight, which is a gift to a print. Around the basin the old mills and yards print as short dense blocks, and the railway fans out of the station immediately north of the water in a spread of curves that is the busiest drawing on the sheet.

The centre itself is compact and close to rectilinear, with the arcades as tiny regular blocks inside it, wrapped by the inner ring road. That ring is the strongest single line in the frame: motorway-standard, curving, and indifferent to the streets it passes over and under. Beyond it the radial roads take over — the Otley Road north through Headingley, Roundhay Road north-east, Dewsbury Road south — with back-to-back and through terraces combed off them at right angles in long repeating runs. That repetition is what gives a Leeds print its texture: street after parallel street, stopping abruptly where a park or a beck interrupts.

The parks are large and few, so they read strongly: Woodhouse Moor above the university, Roundhay at the north-eastern edge of a wide frame. The seven-kilometre frame here reaches from Holbeck in the south to Chapel Allerton in the north. Tighter, at two kilometres, the terraces separate into individual streets with their own back lanes — the frame most people want for the house they grew up in.