‘Town Street’: Re-imagining Armley in photographs

This week in Local and Community History Month we hear from Hannah White, who has creatively re-used some images from our Leodis archive to show contrasts and continuities between Town Street in Armley, then and now… You can read much more about Armley in our mini-series of articles, or explore our Armley research guide to…

The Leylands in Poetry

We welcome local poet Sally Michaelson this week on the Secret Library Leeds, who offers some poignant poetry about the Jewish community of Leeds and the Leylands area of the city centre. We are publishing these poems as part of Local and Community History Month. We hope you enjoy these poems. You can find out…

Thorne’s of Leeds: A Research Jigsaw

This week we’re delighted to publish the first in a series of guest posts for Local and Community History Month. Today, we hear from researcher Andrew Littlewood on his exploration of resources in our Local and Family History department, in his search for information on Henry Thorne & Co. Ltd… You can find out more…

Leeds and the Green Bin

To mark Earth Day 2024 we welcome Dr. Henry Irving from Leeds Beckett University, who follows a popular talk given at the Central Library last week with an article exploring the surprising recent history of waste and bins in Leeds… Update: Dr Irving’s talk is now available to view on YouTube If I asked you…

I Was Here: Diversity In Medieval Yorkshire

This week we welcome back Danny Friar, one of our most popular guest authors, who offers a sequel to his important previous work looking at hidden, underwritten and marginalised histories in Georgian Yorkshire… It has been around a year since I last contributed as a guest author on the Secret Library Leeds blog so I…

Reflections of a Secret Library Guest Author

This week, as part of our 10th birthday celebrations, we hear from Tony Scaife, regular guest contributor to the blog, who offers his thoughts about the last decade of research and writing for the Secret Library… As just one of many guest contributors it is gratifying to be asked to write a post for the…

Ten years of guest authors!

Over the past ten years the Secret Library Leeds blog has seen a host of guest authors writing about their projects, studies or interests. Here we look back at just a few of them. Guest authors come about in a variety of ways. Sometimes a researcher will approach Leeds Libraries with a query and in…