Financial meltdown seems a distant prospect when one strolls on a sun-soaked afternoon through the dappled shadows of trees lining the gently winding road in an affluent suburb of a British city.

Main Street USA this is not, but closed doors hide many stories. Knock on a few of them and you discover that a global banking crisis has long arms.

Hall Lane’s detached and semidetached properties line the northern boundary of a 37-acre park in Horsforth, a suburb of Leeds that still likes to think of itself as the village it once was before an expanding city swallowed it whole.

In Hall Lane yesterday, no pinstriped City gents were threatening to throw themselves from an upstairs window ledge. The fall would not, in any case, have been a great one and the lawns looked too springy to do much damage. To talk to the householders, however, was to learn of a secure world turned suddenly upside down. Behind those doors lay fear, uncertainty, anger and bewilderment.

Here was the man worried about his job, the widow confused about her pension, the couple who cannot sell their house and the business that has lost 40 per cent of its trade in a matter of weeks. Each day they await the news headlines with an unaccustomed sense of trepidation. And these folk do not live in a struggling, postindustrial city long since fallen on hard times.

This is brash, cocky Leeds, England’s largest financial centre outside London, home to Harvey Nicks and enough upmarket restaurants, shops, bars and clubs to satisfy the most demanding of millionaires.

The first sign that the party years might be over came earlier this year as the city’s buy-to-let boom came to a sudden, juddering halt.

Leeds’s landscape had been transformed by the rush to build high-rise apartments to meet an expected surge in demand for a city centre life-style. When property prices stopped soaring, and then began to fall, developers caught a cold and some of the giant cranes that dominated the skyline began to disappear. It has been estimated that at least 1,000 of the 6,000 flats built in the city centre since 2002 are now lying empty.

Buy-to-let investors, many of whom purchased new-build flats off-plan, have found themselves stuck with empty properties worth considerably less than they paid for them.

Horsforth may be only five miles from the city centre, but for most of the residents of Hall Lane the woes of urban-chic property speculators had seemed initially as comfortably distant as a crisis on Wall Street.

Many have lived in the road for 10, 20, 30 years or longer. They bought solid houses to live in and since the mid1990s have seen their value soar.

Homes that were selling for about £100,000 in 2000 had more than doubled in price by 2004. A year ago one was sold for £430,000.

Norman Pearce, 82, a retired lecturer, paid £3,650 for his home in the late 1960s. His money has been in the Yorkshire Bank, originally the Yorkshire Penny Bank, for a long time and he intends to keep it there.

He was more worried yesterday about his daughter, who received a lump sum when her husband died recently and was advised to put it all into the Bradford & Bingley.

“It’s the not knowing what’s going to happen that is the worst thing. She’s been very upset. I don’t understand how the hell the whole world has ended up in this situation,” he said.

Mr Pearce’s neighbour, John Pearson, 51, fears that his may be one of the first jobs to suffer from a long-term economic downturn. He is a self-employed tailor who produces handmade, bespoke suits for retail outlets, which sell them to affluent customers for more than £1,500. “When the Northern Rock thing first blew up it was just like someone had turned a tap off. I had a couple of very lean months, then things seemed to pick up, but it’s not going to be good news for me when all those bankers lose their big bonuses. I’ve got bank accounts with HBOS but at least I’m not worried about my savings because I’m overdrawn on all of them! I suppose it’s some consolation to be poor at a time like this.”

Across the road on the edge of the park, Celia Yeadon was keeping a close eye on her grandson, Ben, aged 3, in the children’s play area.

She and her husband were both self-employed and have relied for their pension on their own house and investments in property. They had hoped to sell their home and down-size, but have now taken it off the market because they were unable to sell it, which has scuppered their hopes of buying a holiday home overseas.

“It’s so frustrating when all your plans have to go on hold, but we’re having to rethink everything. We’ll stay where we are and rely on our savings, but we’re going to have to be much more careful about our spending,” she said.

In the heart of Hall Park lies Bageecha, an Indian restaurant that underwent a £30,000 refurbishment at the start of the year, reopening in April. “We wanted to go slightly upmarket. Indian restaurants are very competitive and we felt the quality of the food, the service and the decor needed to be raised,” Jafrul Gazi said.

All went extremely well at first, but in the past four weeks he estimates that customer numbers have plunged by at least 40 per cent. “People are panicking. They’re not sure what’s going to happen to their savings and they’re worried about mortgage rates, so they are feeling insecure and vulnerable.

“When that happens, we suffer because our customers stay at home. It’s the same all over Yorkshire. All we can do is wait with bated breath and pray that Christmas will be good.” Some people seemed utterly confused by it all. One 69-year-old widow said that she did not have much money, but had received two letters from her bank recently, encouraging her to sign up for a credit card.

“It a Mastercard. I don’t know what to do. I always watch the news and I’m hoping I’ll be okay, but what should I do about this Mastercard. Do you think it would help me to get one?”

Her neighbour, who asked not to be named, would have told her to rip the letters up. “My money is in a building society and I don’t think they’ve taken as many risks as the banks, which have been far too greedy, encouraging everyone to borrow too much.

“I come from an era when you didn’t buy anything unless you’d got the money. In those days you wouldn’t dream of borrowing money. If you couldn’t afford it, you did without.”