What Aerial Photographs Teach Us About Regeneration

There’s something endlessly fascinating about an aerial photograph.

At one level, it’s simple curiosity. You can lose yourself in the detail: the road patterns, the scale of old industrial sheds, the meandering line of a river, the footprint of a building that no longer exists. But look a little longer and aerial photographs become something else entirely. They become a way of reading a place. Not just what it looked like, but how it worked, what it valued and what it might become next.

From above, you can see what a place was built for. You can see where industry once dominated, where roads and rail dictated growth, where the river was a working asset rather than a lifestyle backdrop. You can see the leftover edges, the awkward bits of infrastructure, the plots that made perfect sense 70 years ago but less sense now. And, crucially, you can see how cities evolve, often from low-rise industrial sprawl into higher-density neighbourhoods built around homes, workspace, public realm and amenity.

I have chosen these two images to demonstrate what I mean. They show Brewery Wharf, home to our Leeds office,  and the neighbouring Aire Park. Both capture a part of Leeds that has changed dramatically, and is still changing now. 

If you look at the older images the priorities are obvious. Low-rise sheds, yards and mills. Functional roads and buildings designed to make, move and store things rather than attract residents, office workers or footfall. The river and canal aren’t scenic extras, they’re part of the operating system.

It’s messy, practical and unapologetically industrial.

The more recent image shows the same part of Leeds with a very different role. The bones are still there, but the city has changed.  What was once industrial edge-of-centre territory is now part of a much bigger city centre story, one about mixed-use living, workspace, leisure, public realm and long-term delivery of the South Bank.

At street level, regeneration can feel bitty. A new office building here, a residential block there,  a stretch of hoarding or meanwhile use. All play an essential part in regeneration but are often experienced in fragments.

From above you can see where the city centre has stretched. You can see where industrial land has been absorbed into the urban core. You can see roads being reworked, plots consolidated, density increasing and public realm becoming more deliberate. You can see the city moving from a landscape built around production to one built around experience, connection and value.

That’s what makes aerial imagery so useful in our world. It helps you read not just what a place is, but what it’s becoming.

And that matters, because good placemakingThe process of designing, managing and marketing public spaces to create successful, attractive and functional communities that reflect local culture and enhance well-being. starts long before you write a name, design a brochure or launch a website. It starts with understanding the DNA of a place: what shaped it, what patterns still exist and what gives it a right to feel distinctive in the future.

Brewery Wharf and Aire Park are a perfect case in point.

Historically industrial city centre fringe shaped by brewing, manufacturing, warehousing and transport. Practical, productive and heavily tied to the infrastructure of the city. Over time, that role changed. Some uses became obsolete. Some buildings disappeared. Some structures and routes remained. And gradually, the area shifted from somewhere you worked in or moved through to somewhere people actively choose to live, work and spend time.

Brewery Wharf was part of that first wave of change: a waterside regeneration story that helped reframe this stretch of Leeds as somewhere with residential appeal and a stronger sense of destination.

Aire Park is the next chapter at a very different scale, the former Tetley brewery site becoming a new mixed-use neighbourhood with homes, offices, green space, retail and public realm. It’s a major piece of city-making, but it’s also part of a much longer pattern of city centres reclaiming industrial land for a new economy.

Regeneration is often presented as a clean break: new brand, new buildings, new audience, new story. But the places that really work rarely behave like that. They don’t pretend the past never happened. They use it.

This means understanding which parts of a place’s history still have value, physically, culturally or emotionally  and using them to create something with more texture and credibility.

Sometimes that’s a retained building. Sometimes it’s an old street pattern, a yard, a chimney, a waterside edge or an industrial name. Sometimes it’s simply the story of what the place once did and why that still shapes its character today.

Aerial photographs are brilliant for uncovering those clues. For me, aerial imagery isn’t just a nice historical reference. It’s a practical placemakingThe process of designing, managing and marketing public spaces to create successful, attractive and functional communities that reflect local culture and enhance well-being. tool.

They show layers of industry, ambition, infrastructure, decline, reinvention and growth all sitting on top of one another. They show us that today’s glossy mixed-use quarter may have been yesterday’s industrial backland. That a piece of city centre waterside now sold on lifestyle and amenity might once have been valued for storage, servicing and access to transport. 

Before the branding,  brochure,  CGI flythrough and before the hoarding copy and the launch campaign there’s a place with a history, a structure and a logic of its own that can inform the future.