Light Neville Street: A New Gateway for the city of Leeds

Neville Street is a single street with three lanes of vehicular traffic that leads directly on to the main Leeds city centre loop road. Running under a large railway bridge, it is the main thoroughfare into Leeds city centre from the south and the M621 motorway. This one street is the main connection between the city centre and the communities of Beeston, Holbeck and Holbeck Urban Village to the south of the River Aire.

It is also very dark, very noisy and very inhospitable.

In June 2008 this street will undergo a £4.6 million transformation to create a gateway that the city can be proud of. Owned by Network Rail and developed through a partnership between Leeds City Council and Yorkshire Forward, Neville Street has taken five years to come to fruition and promises to be a truly unique icon for the city.

The programme of improvements, entitled 'Light Neville Street', aims to upgrade the tunnel using innovative engineering and acoustic techniques, including sound-absorbing wall-panels and a new lighting scheme. The improvements will also widen the current footpaths by a total of 1.25m (0.75m on the west wall and 0.5m on the east wall) making it a safer environment for people with disabilities to move along the street.

Robust, graffiti-resistant, anodised aluminium wall panels will contain an innovative sound-absorbing material called QuietStone, used in the Channel Tunnel and the London Underground to manage sound-levels.

A new lighting scheme incorporating thousands of LEDs, will improve light levels in the tunnel. Alongside this an audio installation will be created to soften the traffic noise experienced in the tunnel. A complimentary lighting scheme installed on the west wall, will subtly remind drivers to watch their speed, whilst improving security in the tunnel by contributing to a lighter, brighter environment added to existing CCTV cameras at either end of the tunnel.

The work at Neville Street has been funded through a partnership between Leeds City Council and Yorkshire Forward with a unique programme of art developed under the Northern Way funding the Hans Peter Kuhn work known as 'A Sound and Light Transit' which will form the east wall and the sound installation.

For more info visit the Holbeck Urban Village Site