In our final Hidden Nature, Hidden History post for Heritage Open Days 2020 we include some notable areas just outside our City Centre walking route. We hope you’ve enjoyed the 2020 tour and learning more about the green sites we enjoy today and the history and stories behind them. Queen Square Queen Square was planned…
Search Results for: little woodhouse
Hands-On Urban History #1: Little Woodhouse
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library Last Saturday, as part of our 2017 Library Fest programme, we welcomed a group of budding urban historians and explorers to the Central Library, for a workshop where they would help staff from the Local and Family History department research and investigate a fascinating item that had…
Demanding Recognition: Butch and Mates in Woodhouse, 1970
This week, Librarian Antony Ramm provides some context for a popular 1970 photo of Leeds. Our Leodis archive is home to thousands of historical photos of Leeds, but one in particular caught a lot of attention on social media over the last few weeks: this 1970 image showing a group of children in the Servia Hill…
The Owl on Woodhouse Moor
Bill McKinnon, local historian and activist, looks back over the life of the Woodhouse Moor Owl – a sculpture so mysterious, we can’t even find a photograph of it! “The Owl … will mount his pedestal today as an emblem of Leeds,” wrote John Lee in the Leeds Times on Saturday 14 April 1883. “The figure of the…
The HIDDEN NATURE, HIDDEN HISTORY trail
To discover more about any of the stops on this trail, click on any title to be redirected to a longer article elsewhere on this blog. You can follow the trail from home, by reading the articles in the order listed below (you could even use Google Street View, if you wanted to follow the…
William Boyne and the Voices of History
Librarian Antony Ramm takes a look at the deep history behind the creation of a celebrated Leeds antiquarian “masterpiece”. This article has been written to accompany the publication of a new Research Guide at the Central Library, exploring our Leeds Antiquarian Collection… William Boyne was born in Leeds around 1814, to Thomas Boyne, a successful local…
The WILLIAM BOYNE COLLECTION
A brief life of William Boyne William Boyne was born in Leeds in 1814/15, to Mary and Thomas Boyne, a prominent tobacco importer and manufacturer. At William’s birth, or soon after, the family lived in St. Peter’s Square, just opposite what is today the bus station. Some time after that, the Boynes had achieved sufficient…
Writing Leodis
Librarian Mark Kirkby set Garforth Writers’ Group an offbeat creative challenge recently, using photographs from our local photographic archive, Leodis, as inspiration. On arrival, the writers were presented with a set of images showing a variety of places and potential settings, across different time periods. They each selected an image to provide a basis for a…
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