BRIEF HISTORY OF LEEDS
The River Aire meanders its
way south-eastwards across Yorkshire and eventually
joins the Humber and the North Sea. In prehistoric
times it flowed through a heavily wooded and swampy
valley and it is here, at a ford over the river,
that the village of Leeds was established. Other
villages such as Armley, Bramley, Headingley and
Hunslet grew up on the rolling hills around it.
However, it was Leeds, at that vital river
crossing, which came to dominate the surrounding
out-townships, gradually absorb them and ultimately
become a major European city.
When the country was in the
grip of the Ice Ages animals like the mammoth
roamed through the Aire valley. As the ice melted
and pine and birch trees began to dot the
landscape, hippopotami wallowed in the swamps by
the river and the auroch and red deer foraged in
the surrounding hills. The antlers of a red deer
have been found at Kirkstall; at Thwaite Mills the
tusk of a mammoth and at Wortley the remains of
three hippopotami.
The first human inhabitants of
the area appeared in the Mesolithic or Middle Stone
Age. Their remains have been found at Thorpe
Stapleton a few miles to the east of Leeds.
Implements from the Bronze Age have been found at
Roundhay and Hunslet and a beaker at Tinshill. It
was here on the hilltops north of the valley at
Cookridge and Ireland Wood that the Iron Age Celts
settled. Remains of their huts have been discovered
there but no evidence has been found to support the
theory that an Iron Age fort was established on
Woodhouse Moor.
The Romans marched north to
subdue the Brigantes, the tribe that inhabited most
of northern Britain and a Roman fort and settlement
were built at Burgodonum (Adel). Roman remains have
been found both there and at several other places
in the Leeds area. But it is not until some 300
years after the Romans left Britain that there is
any written mention of Leeds.
About AD 730, the Venerable
Bede, writing his classic 'History of the English
Church and People', refers to Loidis, by which he
meant the town and surrounding area of Leeds. He
also went on to tell how the pagan king, Penda ,was
killed at the battle of Winwaed 'in the region of
Loidis.'
The coming of the Vikings saw
Yorkshire divided into thirdings or 'ridings.'
These were subdivided into wapentakes where the
local assembly met. The villages south of the Aire;
Armley, Beeston, Farnley, Hunslet and the rest were
part of the Morley wapentake. Those to the north,
like Leeds and Cookridge, were in the Skyrack
wapentake which met at the old oak tree in
Headingley. It has been suggested that a Viking
settlement was established at Giant's Hill, Armley,
but no archaeological evidence is available to
support this.
With the arrival of the
Normans comes the first detailed account of the
area. According to Domesday Book Leeds had a mill,
a church and a priest. It was sited around the area
of the present Parish Church and fared much better
than many of its neighbouring villages. William's
punitive devastation, the infamous ‘Harrying of the
North' in 1069 reduced the area between the Humber
and the Tees into a waste land. The villages around
Leeds did not escape. Seacroft, along with
Garforth, Coldcotes, Manston, Bramley, Beeston,
Halton, and Allerton were utterly destroyed. For
some reason, Leeds was left unscathed and actually
increased in value.
In 1207 Maurice
Paynel, the lord of the manor, decided to develop a
new town. He obtained a charter from King John and
the new town grew around the street we now call
Briggate. Most importantly it enabled the
inhabitants to develop their own businesses. It
became a focal point for the surrounding
out-townships, standing as it did at the river
crossing. Leeds probably had a bridge across the
Aire in Norman times and certainly one existed by
1372. Slowly the old town, centred on Kirkgate, and
the new one, around Briggate, coalesced.
By the fourteenth century
Leeds was a busy place. Records show that there
were two innkeepers, a butcher, and three smiths
working in it. The beginnings of the textile trade
are noted in the mention of the three dye vats in
the town. In Kirkgate was the common oven where
bread was baked and to the west of the town, on the
site where the Scarborough Hotel now stands, was
the lord's manor-house. Ranging north and west from
there was the rolling parkland used by the lord for
hunting - hence the names Park Row, Park Place and
Park Square. Basinghall Street, originally Butts
Lane, was the site of the archery butts and at
Burmantofts, the borough men's tofts, were found
some of the open fields where grain was grown. It
would be ground into flour at the watermill sited
on the river bank at the bottom of Mill Hill.
The church dominated everyday
life. Apart from the Parish Church there were
numerous chantry chapels around Briggate and
Kirkgate. Although the manor of Leeds was
relatively small, the parish of Leeds encompassed
the villages of Hunslet, Headingley, Bramley,
Seacroft and the rest of the out-townships. Adel
and Whitkirk were separate parishes. A fine example
of a mid-twelfth-century Norman church can still be
seen at Adel and at Whitkirk is the only medieval
church within the old city boundaries.
The Leeds area also could
boast two religious settlements. In 1152,
Cistercian monks from Fountains Abbey founded a
monastery at Kirkstall. Its remains are among the
best preserved monastic ruins in Europe. A little
later, the Knights Templar established a settlement
east of the town near the village of Newsam.
Nothing of their habitation now remains other than
the name Temple Newsam.
By the beginning of the
seventeenth century the wool trade had become
Leeds' main industry. Its cloth market, originally
held on the bridge, expanded so rapidly through the
century that it was eventually moved to Briggate
itself. However, by the 1620s disreputable
clothiers were seriously damaging the business by
selling inferior cloth and claiming that it was the
original Leeds product. To combat this, Leeds
merchants argued that the town should be able to
regulate the trade through its own corporation.
Thus in July 1626, Charles I granted the town its a
charter and the first corporation of Leeds was
established.
Active in campaigning for the
new charter was John Harrison, a Leeds woollen
merchant. He was to become one of the greatest
benefactors of the town. In 1624 he replaced the
old grammar school which had been founded in 1552,
and in 1634 he built St John's Church at the top of
Briggate. 
However, the gradual economic
prosperity of the town was halted as firstwar and then pestilence swept
the land. With England riven by civil war, Leeds
found itself in the hands of the Royalists. Then in
January 1643, Sir Thomas Fairfax and his
Parliamentarians launched a two pronged attack on
its defences. Whilst the main body attacked the
town from Woodhouse Moor a smaller body advanced on
Leeds Bridge from the south. The action was centred
around Briggate and lasted for about two hours.
Fairfax was successful. Some 500 prisoners were
taken but, in his words, ‘There were not above
forty slain.'
Two years later an even worse
disaster struck the town. Bubonic plague, which had
made repeated appearances in Leeds through the
centuries, struck in Vicar Lane. It spread quickly
through Leeds and on to the out townships. Between
March and December that year some 1,325 people
perished.
Fortunately the town recovered
fairly quickly from its setbacks and by 1720 when
Daniel Defoe visited it he was able to remark of
its cloth market that it was ‘a prodigy of its kind
and not to be equalled in the world.' Knowledge of
the period is considerably aided by the fact that
the Leeds antiquarian, Ralph Thoresby kept a diary
of the times and published, among other works, his
famous Ducatus Leodiensis, the first history of the
town. Not surprisingly, the premier historical
society of Leeds, formed in 1889, was named after
him.
The eighteenth century saw
Leeds growing in strength both industrially and economically as well as
culturally. The textile trade was flourishing. The
numerous coal mines in the area provided fuel for
the increasing population and for the textile
factories which were beginning to emerge as the
Industrial Revolution began to develop. Predominant
among the local entrepreneurs who led the way were
Benjamin Gott and John Marhshall. The woollen cloth
manufacturer Gott became one of Europe's largest
employers. His Bean Ing mill, sited at the west end of Wellington Street where the Yorkshire Post building used to stand, was the
first to concentrate all the processes of
manufacture under one roof. His smaller mill at
Armley is now the Leeds Industrial Museum. John
Marshall's flax mills in Holbeck can still be seen
on Marshall Street. His most famous and original is
a full scale replica of the Ancient Egyptian temple
at Edfu which Marshall opened 1838.
Several important buildings
were erected at this time time. Cloth halls were
built for the sale of the cloth; the Coloured Cloth
Hall, where dyed cloth was sold, was sited on
present City Square whilst part of the one-time
magnificent White Cloth Hall can still be seen
behind the present Corn Exchange. Leeds General
Infirmary was opened on Infirmary Street to meet
the medical needs of the growing population. To
cater for cultural pursuits the Assembly Rooms were
built next to the White Cloth Hall; on Hunslet Lane
the Theatre Royal opened as did music halls in
Albion Street and Vicar Lane. The longest lasting
of these cultural contributions is the Leeds
Library which opened in 1768. It eventually moved
to its present home in Commercial Street and is
today the oldest surviving example of a
subscription library left in England.
Throughout the eighteenth
century transport was a national major issue. It
was no less so in Leeds. However, by the end of
that century the town was developing into a major
coaching centre. The Leeds-Liverpool Canal and the
Aire and Calder Navigation were both opened,
linking the heartland of the industrial West Riding
with both west and east coasts. Meanwhile, the
building of a waggonway in 1758 to transport coal
from Middleton Colliery to Leeds heralded the
beginning of the railway age.
The nineteenth century saw the
population of Leeds soar from 53,162 in 1801 to
428,572 in 1901. By the Victorian Age Britain had
emerged as a major industrial nation and could
claim to be the ‘workshop of the world'. Leeds was
part of that success as it saw new industries begin
to make their impact upon the town. The woollen and
flax industries were still active until the 1870s
and 1880s but as the century developed old
industries like engineering expanded and new
industries such as ready-made clothing emerged. But
Leeds was fortunate in having a diversified
industrial base and other dominant industries
included leather, printing and brewing.
During the nineteenth century
the increasing population, recurring economic
crises, widespread poverty, appalling working and
living conditions and political agitation posed
problems the town had difficulty in coping with.
Luddite riots broke out in Leeds in 1812 and in
1842 military intervention was required to support
the newly formed Leeds Police force in suppressing
a Chartist insurrection. Meanwhile, mass
demonstrations on Holbeck Moor were the Leeds'
response to the government's refusal to introduce
some form of Parliamentary Reform. In 1832 when the
Reform Bill was eventually passed Leeds was finally
granted two MPs.
Diseases; cholera in 1832 and
1848 and typhus in 1847 took a heavy toll in the
poorer areas. Robert Baker, the Leeds town surgeon,
produced a series of reports which graphically
identified the problem and which in turn became
recognised as being of national importance whilst
Leeds-born Richard Oastler, the ‘Factory King',
launched his national campaign for factory reform
in the Leeds press.
Many of those affected by the
squalor and poverty were Irish immigrants, fleeing
their homeland following the Potato Famine of the
1840s. In the 1880s a new wave of immigrants, this
time Jews, escaping the pogroms of eastern Europe,
arrived in the town. Most of these newcomers
settled down to work in the ready-made clothing
industry.
Over the years the council,
re-formed in 1835, only slowly began to come to
grips with the problems of the town. However, it
felt confident enough to build a Town Hall as an
example of its civic strength which Queen Victoria
opened in 1858. Then, over the years, it gradually
provided an adequate water supply, an education
service and a public transport tramway system.
Transport developed over the century as roads were
improved and new ones constructed. From the port of
Leeds vessels sailed regularly to London and other
places on the east coast and from 1834 the building
of several railways running from the town was
undertaken.
If most of its workers lived
in back-to-backs, Leeds could nevertheless boast
some fine architecture. The New Infirmary opened in
1868, the Grand Theatre ten years later and in 1874
the Yorkshire College of Science which eventually
become the University of Leeds in 1904.
In 1893 Leeds became a city, boasting an effective
tramcar service, libraries, parks, schools and one
of the finest shopping centres in the North, famed
particularly for its arcades. By now the village by
the Aire had spread itself across the hillsides of
the valley, absorbing the local townships. It had
become as the 'Yorkshire Factory Times' described
it 'A vast business place ... a miniature London.'
The twentieth century saw that
development continue. The biggest industrial change
was the decline of the traditional textile industry
and by 1926 tailoring, distributive trades, and
engineering dominated the eighty-odd other trades
being carried out in the city. By then Montague
Burton's bespoke tailoring factory on Hudson road,
employing 16,000, become the largest and most
popular clothing company in Europe. It was the
diversity of its industries which has proved to be
Leeds' greatest strength and enabled it to survive
the turbulent years of economic crisis and
political conflict in the first half of the
century.
It was a century which again
saw the city mirror the historical events of the
rest of the country. Mrs Pankhurst and her
suffragettes met on Woodhouse Moor in 1908. There
were Labour disputes like the corporation workers'
strike of 1913 to 1914 which resulted in paralysing
the city for a while. The appalling events of the
First World War were brought home to the local
population in July 1916, when virtually every
street in Leeds lost a man in the bloody Battle of
Somme. As a prelude to the Second World War,
Fascists and Communists clashed on Holbeck Moor.
Leeds also had a major housing
problem to address as considerable numbers of its
back-to-backs were classed as unfit for human
habitation. Thus, between the wars, the development
of large corporation estates and areas of new
private housing was undertaken. The most
imaginative of these schemes was the building of
Quarry Hill Flats between 1935 and 1941. This was a
dramatic move to provide over 3,000 people with
homes on a single site.
Fortunately Leeds was
relatively unscathed by the bombing of the Second
World War although seventy-seven Leeds people were
killed and197 buildings were destroyed. The post
war years saw more and more housing estates being
built, new schools erected and public facilities
improved. The ethnic mix of the city also altered
during the 1950s and 1960s when large numbers of
West Indian and Asian immigrants settled in the
city.
In 1974 Leeds became a metropolitan district with a population of 730,000. During the 1980s recession it suffered a high degree of unemployment, though not as drastically as some places. Race riots in the Chapeltown area erupted in 1981 but great efforts have been made to improve relations between the various ethnic groups of the city and these have met with considerable success. There was still much room for improvement. In 1986 some 2,600 houses in the city that had no bath, inside lavatory or hot and cold water. Some areas were designated Urban Priority Areas where crime, long term unemployment and deprivation generally were felt. But changes were coming. Many took the opportunity to buy their council house whilst the rundown Aire waterfront was transformed as the Labour council and the Development Corporation converted the area of derelict warehouses and run-down docks into expensive apartments, hotels and quality restaurants with its crowning achievement being the Royal Armouries.
By the twenty-first century Leeds had become one of the boom towns of Europe. It is today the second major centre in the country for printing and publishing and the third largest centre for media and communications. In fact some 35 per cent of the country’s e-mail traffic is carried on from there. Today there are about thirty national and international banks in the city, as well as law firms, companies offering financial services, accountancy firms, and insurance companies.
As the people of Leeds stand in the second decade of the new century and view the future, not surprisingly they do so with the same thoughts passing through their heads that occupied those of their forebears in December 1900 as they viewed a new century. Then the Leeds Mercury anticipated the future and contemplated on what was to come, ‘wonders far surpassing anything the wisest among us can foresee or imagine’.
David Thornton
All illustrations used on this page were drawn by Dr. Thornton and are from his book 'The Picture Story of the City of Leeds' ISBN 0 907339 19 0
Other books by Dr. Thornton are :
General histories
Leeds; the Story of a City (Ayr, 2002) Fort Publishing ISBN 0-9536576-6-3
Great Leeds Stories (Ayr, 2005) Fort Publishing ISBN 0-9544461-9-4
The Story of Leeds (Stroud, 2013) The History Press ISBN 978 0 7524 9957 4
For children
The Picture Story of Kirkstall Abbey (Leeds, 1978) ISBN 0 907339 14 X
The Picture Story of the City of Leeds (Leeds, 1983) ISBN 0 907339 19 0