Chaos and Magick: The Sorcerers Apprentice Occult Bookshop

By Richard McKenna / August 10, 2026 Grimy, esoteric capital of the ‘80s North of England, post-Thatcherism Leeds was a peculiarly dual-natured place. An increasingly moribund industrial economy still haunted by the atrocities of the Yorkshire Ripper and a city that had torn up its Victorian tram lines and driven massive highways through its body, it felt as though it were lurching towards death’s door. Yet at the same time, in the hiatus before its eventual rebirth as the financial service hub, profit-driven-university town, and glistening shopping Mecca for new wealth of the new millennium, there was strange life teeming in the ailing body. Certified home of goth and breeding ground for bands of all types, Leeds had what must have been one of the most vibrant youth and counterculture scenes in the UK at the time. Squatting was still legal, and the city’s abundance of empty terraced houses abandoned by their absentee landlords—who owned dozens of properties that they left to rot…