The Town and Country Club (The O2 Academy)

This list entry was subject to a Minor Enhancement on 05/06/2018

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LEEDS COOKRIDGE STREET (West side) No. 55, The Town and Country Club (The O2 Academy)

(Formerly listed as The Town and Country Club, COOKRIDGE STREET, previously listed as: COOKRIDGE STREET (West side) Theatre-in-Education and Workshops for Leeds Playhouse)

25/06/75

GV II Formerly known as: The Town and Country Club, COOKRIDGE STREET and The Coliseum Theatre COOKRIDGE STREET.

Theatre, now a music venue.1885. By William Bakewell. Ashlar facade, brick to sides and rear, slate roof. Gothic Revival style front of four bays. Central entrance arch enriched with carved foliage, carved panels above with shields of the principal Yorkshire towns of the day; large rose window and panelled parapet with statue of Britannia at the apex. Lower flanking bays have panelled double doors in round arch with stained glass in the fanlight, paired and single round-arched stair windows above; three-light windows with plate tracery and balustraded balcony to upper floor. The bays divided by corbelled buttresses with finials. Gabled outer wings with altered entrances.

INTERIOR: no original features seen at Review; floor levels changed, seating removed, open to roof.

HISTORIC NOTE: Built as the Coliseum Theatre and opened by the Prince and Princess of Wales, the great hall was described as 'one of the finest in the north of England' (Kelly, 1913) and was the property of Taylor's Drug Company Ltd.

The Coliseum was used for political meetings and it became a site for protests by the Women’s Social and Political Union (WSPU), the militant suffrage organisation founded by Emmeline Pankhurst in Manchester in 1903. Several women were thrown out of the building for disrupting a speech by Liberal MP John Burns in December 1907. In October 1908 when Prime Minister Asquith visited Leeds local suffragettes and leaders of the local unemployed held a large protest meeting outside the Coliseum. Jeanie Baines, a WSPU organiser, urged the crowd to ‘break down the doors’ of the building; she was arrested and became the first woman to be tried by jury for a suffrage offence. When Asquith returned to speak at the Coliseum in November 1913 large numbers of mounted police kept suffragette demonstrators on the other side of the road, and several windows in adjacent buildings were smashed during this protest. The theatre became the Gaumont cinema in 1928, and in the 1960s it became a rehearsal room and workshops for Leeds Playhouse before being turned into a nightclub, and later a music venue in 2008.

This list entry was amended in 2018 as part of the centenary commemorations of the 1918 Representation of the People Act.

Listing NGR: SE2991534093