This year, to coincide with Heritage Open Days 2021, the Local and Family History Library have created an Edible Leeds Trail. The trail highlights past and present areas of the city centre connected to the food and drink industry and can be followed in order as a 45 minute walk. 1. Leeds Town HallThe Town…
Category: Social History
Gruel and Graft: Researching Leeds Union Workhouse
This week’s blog comes from guest author Emily Coulthard who is a Collections Access Assistant at the Thackray Museum of Medicine. Since joining The Workhouse Network, a subject specialist network which aims to promote understanding of the history and contemporary relevance of welfare, the Thackray Museum of Medicine has been discovering more and more about…
Paintings of Burley
This week on the Secret Library we hear from guest author Jonathan Hooper. Jonathan is an incredible painter, who is here to share some of his paintings of Burley and the inspirations behind them. You can see more of Jonathan’s artwork and process on his website. I am a painter – my subject is the…
West Leeds Boys High School
As part of our ongoing Armley Treasures series, librarian Helen Skilbeck looks at the early history of the West Leeds Boys High School. This is a companion piece to the West Leeds Girls High School blog post of August 2020 by Josh Flint. The school opened in September 1907 and was ‘planned not as a…
The Lost Streets project goes live
Funded by a Jane Moody Scholarship, University of York PhD researcher Joanne Harrison has collaborated with Leeds Central Library’s Local and Family History department and Leeds Museums and Galleries to deliver five online workshops, a new website resource (bit.ly/loststreetsleeds) and a display for the Abbey House Museum. She reports here on the activities of the…
The Chapeltown Uprising of 1981 – commemorating and investigating
This week sees the 40th anniversary of the uprising in Chapeltown, where the weekend of 11/12th of July saw social unrest around Roundhay Road and Chapeltown Road. This coincided with other protests that year in Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham as well as smaller uprisings in Bradford, Halifax and Hull. Leeds Libraries, West Yorkshire Archives,…
Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Heritage Month
As June ends and we say goodbye to Gypsy, Roma and Traveller Heritage month, Senior Librarian Louise Birch takes a look at what our Local History collections hold regarding West Yorkshires 7,000 strong Gypsy & Traveller community. “In many cases Gypsies are invisible in the usual records” Freda Matthews, Gypsies in Leeds Local History (in…
Assimilation and Integration: The Experiences of the Jews of Leeds 1851 to 1861
This week’s article is written by Sophia Lambert, a BA History student at Leeds Beckett University. Sophia utilised the books and resources in the Local and Family History department as part of her research on the Jews of Leeds between 1840-1920. The official date given to mark the establishment of the Leeds Jewish communities is…
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