by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library Forty-years ago this week, the Sex Pistols finally began their 1976 UK tour. “Finally,” because – as the BBC has remembered this week – all but three of the projected dates on that tour were cancelled following the band’s notorious TV appearance on Bill Grundy’s Today show. Those…
Author: Leeds Libraries
Remembering the Barnbow Tragedy: 100 Years Ago Today
by Louise Birch, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Leeds Central Library’s recent exhibition The Barnbow Story in Pictures used photographs taken from the munitions factory to give insight into the lives of the women who worked there. A selection of the exhibition photographs have been included below but, if you would like to…
A Hidden Victorian Treasure in Headingley
by Nick Tasker, PhD student in Philosophy at the University of Leeds During pleasant afternoons in Leeds Central Library I have been discovering a story of upward social mobility in Victorian Leeds. It’s also the story of my front room. I recently moved into a new place in Headingley. It’s in a large Victorian house…
When the Robots Came to Leeds
Heritage volunteer and guest blogger Tony Scaife looks back to 1920s Leeds, when the new word ‘robot’ had a somewhat different meaning… The robot army arrived in Leeds on Friday 16 March 1928. Readers will have to judge for themselves whether Councillor Turtington and the other members of the Leeds Highways Committee were prescient, deluded or…
‘Half a cup of cream which nobody else seemed to want’: The American Diary of a Leeds Librarian
Guest blogger Val Hewson is a researcher for Reading Sheffield, an oral history project about popular reading in the mid-20th century. This has led her to research library services in Sheffield and elsewhere. In the Leeds Local and Family History Library, she read a diary belonging to F.G.B. Hutchings, Chief Librarian of Leeds between 1946…
Read More: American Politics and Elections
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library This is an entry in our Read More series. These are ‘long-form’ articles, where staff offer a curated and detailed look at areas of our book collections, usually based around a specific theme or subject. These posts aim to guide the interested reader through to those books that offer…
Exploring Lost Expeditions in the Collections at Leeds Central Library: A Multi-Sensory Storytelling Experience
by Antony Ramm, Rhian Isaac and Ross Horsley, Central Library Thousands of people visited Leeds Central Library during this year’s Light Night celebrations and over two hundred of those experienced our interactive exhibition – or, as we thought of it: a multi-sensory storytelling experience – dedicated to four stories of loss and obsession in 19th and 20th-century exploration,…
Stories, Songs and Proclamations
By Karen Downham, Local & Family History Library This week in the blog we will be looking at Broadsides, and exploring some of those in the Local & Family History Collection. A broadside, in its simplest definition, is a sheet of paper printed only on one side. They were often posters announcing events, proclamations, and advertisements,…
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