This is the stunning Tiled Hall Cafe in the grand Leeds Art Gallery (1888), which has one of the best collections of C20 art outside London. In National Provincial, Lettice Cooper based the fictional city of 'Aire' on Leeds of the 1930s. It is where journalist Mary comes to work on the Yorkshire Guardian, a newspaper inspired perhaps by the Yorkshire Post and the Manchester Guardian (as it then was). The cafe is an ideal place to read the novel and/or the Yorkshire Post whilst enjoying a cup of tea. 

On the Post this week we have art galleries in places with strong literary connections. This is part of the long frieze above the entrance to the Potteries Museum and Art Gallery in Stoke-on-Trent. It is made from, and illustrates, local materials and crafts: clay, bricks, and pottery. All of these feature in Arnold Bennett's best-known novel, Anna of the Five Towns (1902). In one chapter he describes every step of the pottery process, as Mynors gives Anna a guided tour of his works, including the painting-shop where the paintresses, 'the noblesse of the banks' work (one is seen here on the far left).

Wallpaper goes in and out of fashion, but has largely been superseded by paint which is much cheaper and easier. Nevertheless, there is now a small but thriving market in wallpapers - new and reissued - by well-known artists and designers. This is 'Billets-Doux' by Jonny Hannah.

Wallpaper collections are quite rare, but the Whitworth in Manchester has more than 10,000 examples. It is a diverse and eclectic collection of wallpapers and wall coverings from the C17 to the present and encompasses everything from the hand-printed to the mass market. Its range of C20 wallpapers illustrates "the inventiveness of early post-war design and the exuberance of the 1960s and 1970s". This is 'Provence' by Lucienne Day, one of the three wallpapers designed by Lucienne Day for the 1951 Festival of Britain. It has now been reissued.

The Fry Art Gallery in Saffron Walden reopens for the season on 6th April with its 40th anniversary exhibition 'Finding a Home at the Fry'. This 'celebrates art and design which depicts or was made for the domestic space' and includes some of the wallpapers in its collection. This is 'Bird Nest and Ivy Leaves' (1924) by Edward Bawden.

The original William Morris wallpapers were printed by hand using pear wood blocks and this method of production continues today but on a very small scale as it is, of course, extremely expensive to do. At Charleston, though, Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant did not have ambitions to go into commercial production, but used stencils to create lively, patterned, one-off wallpaper designs to decorate the walls of their rooms (all the designs can be seen in the Charleston collection). 

We have wallpaper on the Post this week, beginning with a superlative design by William Morris (1834-1896), the master of the repeat pattern. The William Morris Gallery, which is housed in what was once Morris' family home in Walthamstow, has a new exhibition from 5th April which brings together a huge range of objects decorated with his enormously popular patterns. But for many, it is still his textiles and wallpapers that display his genius best. This is 'Pimpernel', designed in 1876.