To mark the upcoming Heritage Open Day Week (6-15 September 2024), Library and Digital Assistant Becky Bavill brings us some fantastic detective work in our Central Library archives to (re)discover the site of a long-forgotten mansion in the centre of Leeds… Join us on Saturday September 7 in the Central Library’s Local and Family History…
Category: Leeds History
Housing the city: Leeds City Council papers
This week on the Secret Library we are delighted to hear once again from Andy Armstrong, one of our heritage volunteers, on a significant piece of cataloguing work we’ve asked them to help us with. You can find more articles about housing in Leeds elsewhere on the blog… Hi. My name’s Andy Armstrong and I…
Poor Laws, Workhouses to ‘Food Bank Britain’: a brief overview of how poverty has been understood and addressed from Pre-Modern to contemporary Britain
This week we welcome University of Leeds student Emily O’Riley. Having completed a yearlong research project alongside the Thackray Museum of Medicine, who provided 360 biographies of Workhouse inmates based on 1881 census data, Emily reflects on the Victorian Workhouse and what it can tell us about British society. The first thing we learnt about…
2LS calling: When the Wireless Came to Leeds
This week we hear from Tony Scaife, regular guest author on the Secret Library Leeds, who explores the anniversary of a little-known but hugely important moment in the history of technology, media and broadcasting in Leeds… Monday July 8, 2024 marks the 100th anniversary of public wireless (radio) broadcasting in Leeds. The Local and Family…
Leeds veterans of the American Civil War (Part 2)
This week we welcome back Library and Digital Assistant Joey Talbot for the second part of his illuminating account of American Civil War veterans buried in Leeds… In the previous post, I told of how I was put onto the trail of Leeds veterans of the American Civil War after an email from Andrew Hopkinson…
Cabinet Displays for Armed Forces Day 2024
Visit the Local and Family History department throughout June to see a display curated by our staff exploring two Armed Forces themes, as part of the Armed Forces Day Festival taking place across Leeds this month. One cabinet looks at decompression – the ways soldiers, sailors and air-force personnel relaxed or processed their experiences during…
Leeds Libraries a Century Ago – All Human Life Was There
As a celebration of Volunteers Week 2024, running from next Monday (June 3) to the following Sunday (June 9), we asked freelance writer and one of our longstanding Heritage Volunteers, Tony Harcup, to tell us about about the research he has been doing with old newspaper stories about libraries. When Leeds Libraries appealed for help…
The Places We Live: Redux
This week, for Local and Community History Month, Librarian Antony Ramm offers a brief update to a previous article exploring the histories of communities around the wider Leeds area… Back in May 2022 we published a piece here on the Secret Library Leeds blog that explored the depth and breadth of the local history material…
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