This week Antony Ramm takes a brief tour around the bedrooms of Leeds…

I was recently playing around with the Pot Luck feature on our Leodis image archive (www.leodis.net) to find inspiration for a blog article. (Do try the Pot Luck tool if you’ve not used it before!)

One image that instantly stood out of being of particular interest was this 1924 one showing a City of Leeds Training College study bedroom in Headingley.

The image stood out because images of interiors are fairly uncommon on Leodis – we have many, many images showing the outsides of buildings and places, but very few showing the places people actually lived. That quickly led to the thought: what other bedroom images are there on Leodis? A quick search using the Advanced Search tool (which we would always recommend you use) threw up 87 results. (Click through to the results to see full descriptions of each image, as well as copyright details)

Stripping out those where the word ‘bedroom’ simply appears in the image description, we are left with about 23 photographs. These can be separated into several categories. First are those images showing, like the City of Leeds Training College image above, student accommodation, of which there are rather surprisingly several photographs. These include two images showing female students of Leeds University at home in their attic study bedroom in Lucas Place…

…and another showing a named student (itself a rarity), Miss Muriel Moss, working in her combined study and bedroom at the Oxley Hall of Residence, University of Leeds.

Educational, but in a different way, are the photographs of bedrooms or bedroom furniture that had been relocated to Abbey House Museum. Most interestingly, perhaps, is the Weaver’s Cottage, formerly of Armley and consisting of a single upstairs room which housed the loom, doubling as work place and bedroom. 

But also at Abbey House can be seen three images showing the fireplace in the ‘Abbot’s bedroom’, to be found on the first floor of the Abbey House museum. The fireplace has Victorian wooden panelling and a carved scene depicting the Dissolution of Kirkstall Abbey which took place in November 1539.

Similar, in a way, in its current context of a ‘living museum’ is Temple Newsam, and the images showing both the State and the South Bedrooms – including one photograph from 1941 of artwork relocated from the City Art Gallery during the Second World War.

Alongside these Temple Newsam images we should add the photograph showing the chimney-piece in the Butler’s bedroom at Lotherton Hall.

In stark contrast are those images showing bedrooms of the working classes. (The chapter on municipal-sanctioned ‘slum’ photography in John Tagg’s Burden of Representation is worth reading here). These include 148 High Street in Yeadon, a house on Waterloo Road in Hunslet…

…and several images of bedrooms in the Quarry Hill Flats:

The Yeadon and Hunslet images both show bedrooms in states of damage or disrepair. The most dramatic image in this category, however, is that showing Craven Street, also in Hunslet, where “on the left number 13 and its rear house number 57 Monkton Street have been demolished. The open rectangles visible on the upper wall would have been bedroom fireplaces.”

Finally, two images stand out as being the most unique. First, is a colour photograph showing a mocked-up bedroom in the window of the Lewis’s department store to celebrate 50 years of trading in Leeds throughout 1982.

 And then – and this is cheating to a certain extent – a wonderful photograph that doesn’t in fact show the interior of a bedroom at all, but rather an image taken from a bedroom: it shows a group of men gambling in the street, taken from a bedroom window of a terraced house, number 34 Bickerdike Road.

This photograph was taken by the legendary Leeds photographer Terry Cryer. You can see more of Terry’s photographs on Leodis, and read his (fantastic) autobiography at the Central Library. And keep a lookout for more photographs by Terry making their way to Leodis soon…