The bunker-like headquarters of the Yorkshire Post are being bulldozed to make way for a car park – yet another piece of Leeds brutalism on its way to the concrete knacker's yard. What a shame to see this modern marvel erased from history, says Christopher Beanland

The old Yorkshire Post Building, currently being destroyed by the "hydraulic demolition dinosaurs" of Leeds Photograph: Carl Milner/flickr

The hydraulic demolition dinosaurs are at it again in Leeds. Their concrete meal this time is being selflessly provided by the Yorkshire Post Building (YPB) on Wellington Street, which began its slow journey into their greedy mouths last week. It'll take another month before another of Leeds' modern marvels is erased from history.

The YPB always looked like a bunker and tended to the aggressive. Does that octagonal hall and thrusting clock tower really ape a left fist and middle finger erected in the exact direction of local rival Bradford or was that all just in the imagination? Either way, hardly anyone in Leeds seems to care that this bit of brutalism is on its way to the concrete knacker's yard. The clock tower will be saved and painted black apparently, but everything else will be levelled for a car park. The YPB was designed by hugely underrated architect John Madin – at least in Madin's native Birmingham a campaign group has coalesced around saving the YPB's sort-of twin, Birmingham Central Library, which is also slated for demolition.

It's hard to believe that in 1970, it was all so different. Prince Charles opened the YPB with a flourish. The Royal Institute of British Architects said it made a “dramatic contribution” to Leeds and promptly awarded it a bronze medal. Before swingeing job cuts, the Yorkshire Post was really something – and Leeds had high ambitions too. Leeds was, as it boasted on postmarked letters, the Motorway City of The Seventies.

Perhaps someone somewhere in the city planning department was having a private joke with the motorway in question though - when you look on a map at the A58M/A64M Inner Ring Road designed to speed cars through Leeds, it takes on the unmistakeable shape of... a snail.

The entire length of the snailway boasted a cornucopia of concrete, from the YPB at the west end to Leeds Metropolitan University's Brunswick Building at the east end. The latter went in 2009 so Kaiser Chiefs could play bigger gigs at the new First Direct Arena which replaced it. There's no doubt about it: Leeds is sweeping away its 60s and 70s past.

The 1967 International Pool, with its imposing black roof, also got the chop in '09. The pool was legendarily built too small to be used for Olympic competitions and contributed to the downfall of its notorious architect John Poulson, who was convicted of fraud just a few yards away at Leeds Crown Court in 1974.

In City Square and around the Merrion Centre almost all traces of the impressively bonkers 1970s network of elaborate overhead pedestrianwalkways and subways with their alfresco escalators are gone. The urban legends of what the council planned continue to obsess Loiners. Did the planners really want to renumber every floor level of every building in the city, with City Square being 1? Certainly Leeds University's Level 7 corridor is higher up the hill and students continue to be entranced by tales of sci-fi TV shows being filmed there, and of it being the longest corridor on earth. The University's monumental extension by Barbican architects Chamberlin, Powell & Bon is the one piece of concrete the hard hat men and their demolition dinosaurs can't get their hands on – because it is listed. Which is good, because I thoroughly enjoyed hoovering up dialectical diatribes in the Edward Boyle Library's concrete cocoon as a snotty-nosed nipper studying politics at Leeds.

If only Leeds could have seen the Yorkshire Post Building - and its 60s and 70s hippy sisters - as part of the long Leeds line of brutish buildings that were totally at odds with both good taste and their surroundings, but went on to become landmarks. Bolshy Buildings like the Town Hall and Corn Exchange by Cuthbert Brodrick, and the University's Parkinson Building and WorsleyMedical School. But today the Knightsbridge of the North is only interested in building skinny skyscrapers.

> via The Guardian