If you peer past the grime on the windows of the Old Red Lion in Leeds' Meadow Lane, you’ll experience what the Germans call unheimlich. This eerie sense of the uncanny is not exactly about the decor — you can find the fusty Axminster-style carpet and mustard-yellow chimneybreast in pretty much any old man’s boozer. It’s the dust, the stillness, and the suspicion that, while the rest of the world moves along, nothing will ever happen in here again.
This pub, which hasn’t opened since Covid, is dead. Its only visitor is the rumoured ghost of a woman said to emerge from its doors after closing time — and perhaps now Humphrey Smith himself, the patriarch of the Samuel Smith’s empire who passed away at the age of 81 last month. Why didn’t it reopen after the pandemic? I don’t know — but more on that later.
Smith’s departure has, naturally enough, prompted both speculation for the future and deep nostalgia for the man, his pubs, and how he ran them. His Tadcaster-based brewing empire dates back to 1758 and has grown to more than 200 pubs nationwide, the majority based in the north of England. But a 2024 in-depth Guardian report attempted to contact 59 North Yorkshire pubs, finding at least 30 of them closed at time of writing.
Across conversations with punters, pub workers, and industry watchers, I’ve spent the past week trying to learn about Smith and found that his famed and seemingly obsessive vision of a traditional pub was riven with paradoxes.
Hello — it’s Mia here, one of The Exchange’s two staff writers. I’m in Leeds after covering international news because I’ve got an almost fanatical belief in what local news can and should achieve.
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Decaying buildings
“Loved it back in the days,” said one Facebook commenter, of the Grade-II listed Old Red Lion. Another noted that it’s “in a really up and coming area of town.”
It’s true — turn 180 degrees from the Old Red Lion’s leaded windows and you’ll see a shiny hoarding announcing a new development right at the edge of the 24-acre Aire Park plaza. It’s every landlord’s right to dispose of their property as they wish, including letting it sit there empty.
Only in cases of dilapidation or public health hazard can a council step in with compulsory purchase orders and other measures, Councillor Ed Carlisle told The Exchange. His ward includes Duncan Street, a whole block of which was home to Sam Smith’s pubs the Duncan Pub, and the Star and Garter, each closed for a decade and more respectively.
According to Land Registry records obtained by The Exchange, the whole block is held in a trust connected to one of the companies in the Sam Smith’s pub empire. Today, sitting within eyeshot of the beautifully refurbished Corn Exchange, it sits like a decaying tooth in the middle of the area’s gleaming smile.
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