'Love is not love which alters when it alteration finds" - so why am I so out of sorts with Leeds? I was born and brought up there.

It is the glorious mythical place of my childhood and misspent youth. There was the jail opposite my grandad's newsagents' shop, its turrets like a medieval castle. The magnificent gas works and the rattling trains at Copley Hill goods yard. Over the sooty suburb, St Bartholomew's 19th century gothic church loomed like a Victorian grandparent. Armley Park with its vast scope for cricket and football. West Leeds High School from which I was a consistent truant.

Later there was the City Varieties - before it sold its cheeky soul to television - where dancing girls took their clothes off and comedians had the house rolling and shaking with mucky local jokes. And the Majestic ballroom - really a Saturday night dance hall with waltzes and foxtrots, quicksteps and, in the time of our burgeoning modernity, the twist and the cha cha. Also the Tatler cinema where they showed foreign films. I had a lovely assignation there with a girl existentialist who called herself "Ponytail" - all eye-shadow and French cigarettes.

Recently, I've been having to go up to Leeds again to visit my mother who's in Leeds General Infirmary. I could have died for sheer sorrow. What a dump it is now! A glossy, well-off dump that thinks well of itself of course - the worst sort of dump.

You come out of the station and into City Square with its statues of the Black Prince surrounded by topless nymphs. Horror of horrors and the death of good taste. The lovely Victorian post office is now dwarfed by a nasty white cylinder of a building and the old Mill Hill Unitarian Chapel - that always used to be half full of agreeable half believers - now has blue writing round the roof saying SANCTUARY FOR ALL. I'd have liked to climb up and add: "What, even Osama bin Liner?".

You walk towards the glorious parish church - where the one consolation is that the architecture is unspoiled and the music as wonderful as ever under the mastership of Dr Simon Lindley. But that walk along Boar Lane - where MacFisheries used to have their wet fish stall and past the market where you could get Granelli's ice cream. It made me want to chuck myself in the river Aire for sheer misery.

Pedestrianised wealthy slob shopping. So called "music shops" where audible filth breaks forth over the discarded fast food wrappers. The yobs lurching along in their baseball caps. The inner city poor in their designer trainers. I thought: "All it needs is the barbed wire and it'd be the landscape of totalitarian consumerism". Which is what it is anyway.

I apologise. No doubt the Leeds lads and lasses are as spirited as ever. The football team is vile and sorry for itself as it always was. But Leeds Rhinos are a credit to northern manliness. I wish the City Varieties was still open - instead of the creepy forensic perversion of the sex shops. And that the Yates Wine Lodge were still a proper boozer with sawdust and moderate intimidation of underage drinkers. O time! O manners! That Leeds should come to this!

* Peter Mullen is Rector of St Michael's, Cornhill, in the City of London, and Chaplain to the Stock Exchange.