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…
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George Lucas of Woodhouse and the Leeds Temperance Movement
Antony Ramm, local history Librarian, takes a brief look at an incident in the life of George Lucas, Temperance campaigner in 1850s Woodhouse. This article is also #17 in our People of Leeds series. In the mid-19th-century, the dark side of alcohol was well known to contemporaries; specifically, the damage excessive drinking caused working-class individuals…
Leeds Arts Club and the campaign for women’s suffrage
This week we hear from M.A. student Hannah Cullen on the history of a little-known but highly-influential cultural movement in Leeds and, specifically, its connections with the women’s suffrage movement. Research such as this can be done using Library resources like local newspaper archives and relevant books or pamphlets. A previous article on the Secret…
Woodbine Lizzie
For International Women’s Day 2023 we’re going to delve into the Leodis photographic archive and look at a woman who followed her own path, regardless of social conventions, and while doing so left a mark on the collective memory of Leeds residents. The undated image shows a woman who was once a very familiar character…
A Brief History of Leeds #9: The Early 20th-century, part 2
Part nine of a series exploring the history of Leeds, using books and other stock resources held in the Leeds Libraries collections. For all the entries in this series, see our dedicated page. In our last entry, we finished with the words of Colonel T.W. Harding at the opening of the 1908 ‘Old Leeds’ exhibition…
Leeds Sanitation & Sewers
In today’s post our Senior Librarian for Local Studies & Research, Louise Birch, explores the history of Leeds Sanitation taking, from the local studies collection, David Seller’s work; ‘Hidden Beneath our Feet: The Story of Sewerage in Leeds’ (1997) as the main source material. Sewers and sewerage are something many of us take for granted….
The Land Travelling Exhibition: When the Festival came to Leeds
On the Secret Library this week we hear from Lisa Brown and Flo Armitage-Hookes from the Leeds Modernist. They will be discussing the 70th Anniversary of The Festival of Britain using resources from the Leeds Libraries collection. If you would like to know more about the Leeds Modernist Society then visit their website, Instagram and…
Step Back Leeds
This week we hear about a project making creative use of the Central Library’s 19th-century Political Cartoons collection… Organised by a group of five second-year Liberal Arts students at University of Leeds, Step Back Leeds is a project that works to explore the 19th Century political story of Leeds through the Leeds Libraries’ collection of…
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