The Temple Is Let 138 Days A Year. The Furniture Rolls Away.
The order used its own ritual chamber on thirty-one evenings last year. Its trading subsidiary took £412,000 from weddings, a fencing club and a film unit, and the changeover between the two takes forty minutes.
LEEDS, United Kingdom — Concord House, Leeds, was let to paying strangers on 138 days last year. The order that built it met in its own ritual chamber on thirty-one evenings.
Both figures come out of the same 44-page booking diary.
The building went up in 1928: a double-height chamber, forty-one feet to the lantern, and a mosaic pavement of about 62,000 tesserae laid by a firm in Halifax that closed in 1953.
The order calls the room the temple. The booking pages call it the Great Chamber, 300 seated, in-house catering available.
Last year it held four weddings, nineteen corporate away-days, a fencing club on Tuesdays from September, a film unit for eleven days in March, and eleven Sunday mornings for a Pentecostal congregation whose own roof was being replaced.
Gross income, £412,000. That is not a leak. It is page 6 of the filed accounts of Concord House (Events) Ltd, free to anybody.
The forty minutes
What we did not have was the changeover.
Kezia Ombura-Flett was an events assistant at Concord House from March 2023 until October 2025. She gave us a laminated A4 sheet from the robing-room wall and, when we offered to withhold her name, asked us to print it.
It is headed CHAMBER — TURNAROUND and it runs to nineteen numbered items.
Six of them are furniture. The Master's chair, the two wardens' pedestals, the pedestal lamps and the two ashlars all move on castors, fitted in 1974 and re-shod in nylon in 2011.
Three items are covered: the organ console and two portraits, under dust sheets kept in the chair store below.
Two are turned to the wall. The tracing boards hang on hinges and swing inward.
Item 12 is not about symbolism. It reads: No stiletto heels on the pavement. Offer the loan slippers. If refused, refuse the booking.
Ombura-Flett timed the turnaround from memory, then against her old shift notes. Forty minutes with two people. Twenty-five if it is the fencing club, because the fencing club does not need the pedestals moved, only the strip laid.
The roof
The reason for both numbers is above the lantern.
A 2024 condition survey — read for this newspaper by Deborah Ncube-Tarrant, a chartered building surveyor with no connection to the order — puts replacement of the leadwork, the lantern glazing and eleven roof trusses at £1.9m.
The order has 214 subscribing members. In 1968 it had 1,690. Subscriptions last year came to £39,400. The building's standing costs — rates, heat, insurance, cyclical repair — came to £186,000.
Letting the chamber is not a supplement to the order's income. It is the order's income, and the order's use of the room is what is left over once the paying customers have been fitted in.
What the checklist is actually for
The sheet reads, at first, like an inventory of things that must not be seen.
Set it beside the survey and it is a conservation schedule. The castors are there because the chair weighs 190kg and the pavement is ninety-eight years old. The dust sheets are there because a film unit brings tungsten lamps. Item 12 exists because in 2019 a heel took a tessera out of the north-east quadrant and the repair cost £2,180, itemised in that year's accounts under pavement.
Nothing on the sheet is concealed from the hirers. The fencing club is handed a copy with its contract.
What we could not settle
The 138 counts chargeable bookings only. The order says nine further days were given free to local groups, and a day nobody paid for leaves no mark in the accounts.
The thirty-one is weaker still. We counted summons cards, which record meetings called, not meetings held.
The nearest comparable paper in our vault, PX-2083, is a different order's registration file from 1956, and it records that order's legal existence almost entirely as an address. Orders turn out to be premises. This desk keeps finding that, and it is duller every time.
The Grand Secretary's answer
Roland Achebe-Sturrock has been Grand Secretary since 2019. His letter is printed below, entire.
He argues that a fencing club in the chamber on a Tuesday is nearer to the order's founding purpose — written into the 1928 deed as the improvement of the town and the fellowship of its men — than a locked and darkened room would be. He argues that we have written a story about a building being surrendered when the story in front of us was a building being used.
He also takes away our word own. The room is held on trust, he says, and the trust names the object rather than the order.
We think he has the better of the argument. We have printed the numbers anyway, because he was never going to volunteer them, and because thirty-one is a real figure about a real year and somebody should have to look at it.
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Sources & Method
We did not ask the order how often it used its own building; we counted. A former employee gave us the 2025 booking diary and the laminated turnaround checklist, we checked the diary against monthly captures of the venue's public calendar, took the income figure from accounts anybody can download for nothing, and paid a chartered surveyor to read the roof report before we put a single question to the Grand Secretary.
Who we spoke to
- Kezia Ombura-Flett, Events assistant, Concord House, March 2023 – October 2025. Interviewed three times, twice by video call and once at her kitchen table in Bradford; supplied the turnaround checklist and asked to be named May–July 2026 Declined payment. Her shift notes for 2024 and 2025 were checked against the booking diary line by line.
- Booking diary, Concord House, 1 January to 31 December 2025, 44 pages, kept in the venue office in pencil and biro. Given to us by Ombura-Flett; every chargeable entry checked against monthly captures of the venue's own public availability calendar 2025 Nine entries have no matching capture. All nine fall in August, when the calendar was offline for a site rebuild.
- Concord House (Events) Ltd, annual accounts, Year ended 31 December 2025, filed April 2026. Downloaded from the companies register at no cost, along with the 2019 accounts April 2026 Page 6 carries the £412,000 as turnover. The 2019 accounts itemise a £2,180 repair under 'pavement'.
- Deborah Ncube-Tarrant, Chartered building surveyor, no connection to the order. Commissioned by this newspaper to read the 2024 condition survey and the order's repair correspondence, and told her report would run whether or not it helped us June 2026 Says the £1.9m was conservative when it was written and is more conservative now. The June tenders bear her out.
- Roland Achebe-Sturrock, Grand Secretary, the Order of Concord. Interviewed for fifty minutes at Concord House on 9 July 2026, then sent the full draft, the checklist and our arithmetic, with three weeks to reply July–August 2026 Replied at length and corrected our roof figure. Printed entire.
Documents
- PX-2083 — Association registration file, sub-prefecture, 7 May 1956, with the corresponding entry in the government gazette of 20 July 1956 accepted
What we could not confirm
- Whether 138 is the whole of it. The diary records chargeable bookings and nothing else. The order says at least nine further days last year were given free to local groups, and a day nobody paid for leaves no mark in the accounts, so we can neither confirm the nine nor rule out more.
- The thirty-one. We counted summons cards, which record meetings called, not meetings held. One member's pocket diary shows three of the thirty-one struck through. The order declined to confirm or deny the three, on the ground that attendance is not our business, which is a defensible position and leaves our figure soft in the direction that suits our headline.
- Whether the checklist we hold is current. Our copy is laminated and undated. Ombura-Flett says it was on the robing-room wall when she left in October 2025. The Grand Secretary says a revised sheet has been in use since 2024 and declined to give it to us, so we may be quoting a superseded document with complete accuracy.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostWHAT THEY WHEEL AWAY BEFORE THE GUESTS ARRIVE
Took the turnaround checklist as a concealment protocol and printed nine of its nineteen items.
Had that we did not
A clean photograph of the checklist. Theirs is legible; ours is a scan of a scan and we have said so.
Left out
Items 13 to 19, which concern the boiler, the stacking chairs and the bin bags, and the fact that every hirer is handed a copy of the sheet with the contract.
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Signal & LedgerSacred Space, Commercial Yield: Concord House At £2,986 A Let Day
Read the year as a utilisation problem for readers who run halls, and did the per-day arithmetic better than we did.
Had that we did not
The forty-minute changeover, costed against two staff at the real hourly rate. We had not thought to cost it.
Left out
The roof. A yield story with no mention of the £1.9m is a story about a hall that could have chosen otherwise.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThe Temple Is Let 138 Days A Year. The Furniture Rolls Away.
Counted the days out of the booking diary, set them against accounts anybody can download, and asked the order to answer.
Had that we did not
The diary, the accounts page, the checklist entire including the dull items, and the Grand Secretary's reply unedited.
Left out
We spent three weeks on a fraternal order's rent and four days on the fencing club, whose youngest member is nine and who now trains under the only forty-one-foot ceiling in the city. The Grand Secretary had to point that out to us. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Roland Achebe-Sturrock, Grand Secretary, the Order of Concord on 9 July 2026 in person at Concord House, and again on 24 July in writing with the full draft, the checklist, the accounts extract and our arithmetic, with three weeks to answer. Replied by letter on 12 August 2026. Printed entire and unedited, including the correction to our roof figure and the parts about us.
You have counted correctly and I am not going to quarrel with a single figure, which I hope will be noted, because in my experience a newspaper expects a quarrel and prints the expectation when it does not get one.
Thirty-one evenings. A hundred and thirty-eight days. Four hundred and twelve thousand pounds. All correct. I gave your correspondent the summons cards myself and I would give them to him again.
What I dispute is the shape you have put them in.
You have written a decline. An order that once filled a hall and now rents it out, and a set of secrets wheeled into a cupboard when the money arrives. I understand the appeal. It is the shape the reader expects, and it has a small sad ending, and readers are fond of those.
Here is the other shape. In 1928 the men who built this hall wrote their purpose into the deed: the improvement of the town and the fellowship of its men. They then put up a room seating three hundred, in a city with almost nowhere for three hundred people to sit, and they used it themselves on perhaps forty nights a year and left it dark for the rest. That was not modesty. That was waste. The minute books of the 1930s are full of members saying so, in language a good deal ruder than yours.
Last year eleven Sunday mornings in that room belonged to a congregation whose own roof had failed. Nineteen days belonged to firms who needed somewhere for their people to talk to one another. A fencing club thrown out of a school sports hall trains on Tuesdays and its youngest member is nine years old. I am invited to regard this as the order's humiliation. I regard it as the deed being carried out, and carried out rather better than we managed in 1935.
On your castors, about which you have made a great deal. They were fitted in 1974 by a member who was a joiner, because four elderly men were carrying a chair that weighs a hundred and ninety kilogrammes. They were re-shod in nylon in 2011 because the old wheels were marking the floor. That is the entire mystery. I would ask you to consider that a thing which rolls away is not necessarily a thing being hidden. Sometimes it is a thing being looked after by men whose average age is seventy-one and who cannot lift it any more.
Your item twelve you print twice — once as a joke about heels, once as a conservation note — and I observed that you put the joke first. The pavement is ninety-eight years old and there are four men living who can repair it. One of them is eighty-three.
Where I think you have gone genuinely wrong is the word 'own'. You write that the order's own use of its own temple was thirty-one evenings, as though the room were ours and we had let it slip through our fingers. It is not ours. It is held on trust, and the trust does not name us; it names the object. We are the current arrangement by which that object is kept standing and dry. In eighty years there will be a different arrangement, and I hope it will be less pleased with itself than we occasionally are.
And the roof will still want doing.
One correction, which I do not expect you to enjoy. Your surveyor's £1.9m is at 2024 prices. We have since had two tenders. The lower is £2.34m and it lapses in November. Print that alongside your figure, please, because the distance between the two numbers is the reason I let my own temple to a fencing club, and I would let it again on Sunday if the fencing club asked.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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