Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting a few more articles than usual, all tied to our exhibition Leodis: 400 Years of Leeds in the Leeds Libraries Collections. The exhibition can be seen in our City Library until November 11. This week, our focus is on the equivalent exhibition one hundred years ago, in 1926….

Leeds celebrated the 300th anniversary of the Charter of Leeds in 1926 in the same way we are celebrating the 400th anniversary in 2026. A major feature of those celebrations was the Old Leeds exhibition, ‘bringing together a collection of objects illustrative of the inhabitants of Leeds’ in the centuries since 1626.

Thomas W. Hand, the City Librarian in 1926, served as Honorary Secretary for the organising committee. Other committee members included Alf Mattison, Frank Kidson, John Alexander Symington and Kenneth Sanderson. All were important collectors of material about the history of Leeds, much of which is now held at the City Library.

Examples from each of those collectors can be seen in the exhibition, in a cabinet located just outside our Music and Performing Arts department on the 1st floor.

Frank Kidson
Frank Kidson (1855-1926) was a folksong collector, musical scholar, artist, writer and historian. Kidson was born on Centenary Street, which ran in front of the City Library until Victoria Gardens was laid out in the 1930s.

On display in the City Library’s Leeds400 exhibition is a scrapbook of broadsides collected by Kidson in and around Leeds, a small selection of the more than 2,000 he gathered in his lifetime. Broadsides are single sheets of inexpensive paper, often used to print and publish folk material such as ballads.

Alf Mattison
Alf Mattison (1868-1944) was born in Hunslet and was a photographer, local historian, civil servant and socialist, known to colleagues as ‘Old Leeds’. His comprehensive collection of material about the history of Leeds is held at the City Library.

His 1908 book The Romance of Old Leeds, co-written with Walter Meakin, is one of the most engaging histories of Leeds ever written. It features 13 ‘descriptive sketches of the life of old Leeds’ alongside Mattison’s evocative photographs.

Kenneth Sanderson
The Sanderson Collection features a variety of rare, printed materials concerning vintage fashion, including illustrations, photographs, magazines, books and ephemera. The collection was curated by Kenneth Sanderson, born in Leeds in the 1890s. Kenneth devoted his life to collecting anything related to vintage fashion. He was well known around Leeds for wearing outlandish vintage outfits, including flamboyant gowns coupled with long 18th-century wigs. In the 1940s he was a presenter on BBC radio and often appeared on Children’s Hour to talk about the strange and unique pieces in his fashion collection.

John Alexander Symington
Librarian and bookseller John Alexander Symington (1887-1961) began his career in the Reference department of the City Library. He was employed there from 1902 to 1909.

In 1923 Symington was appointed Librarian to Lord Brotherton of Wakefield, helping to construct the collection of rare books that later formed the basis of the Brotherton Library at the University of Leeds.

Symington was himself a prolific collector of books. Old Leeds Charities was a privately printed edition of an 18th century manuscript in Symington’s own collection.