This week, Librarian Antony Ramm provides some context for a popular 1970 photo of Leeds. Our Leodis archive is home to thousands of historical photos of Leeds, but one in particular caught a lot of attention on social media over the last few weeks: this 1970 image showing a group of children in the Servia Hill…
Category: Social History
Voices from the Past: Textiles in Leeds and West Yorkshire
This week on the Secret Library, we hear from guest author Emily Owen, who is conducting research into the textile industries of Leeds and West Yorkshire. Stowed away in the University of Leeds Library is Special Collections – home to everything from rare medieval manuscripts to the notebooks of famous poets like Tony Harrison, and…
2018 meets 1918, 1818, 1718…
To mark (yet another) new year, librarian Antony Ramm takes a brief look at a a small selection of books from the Central Library collections, all celebrating a significant milestone this year (100th-anniversary, 200th-anniversary, 300th-anniversary): Women and the Labour Party (ed., Dr. Marion Phillips) A collection of essays published in 1918, all written by women…
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…
Tales from Leeds Pantomimes
This week on the Secret Library, local history Librarian, Antony Ramm, brings you three of his favourite stories from Leeds’ rich pantomime tradition. Oh yes he does! In May of 1986, J. Ingle of Otley wrote to the Yorkshire Evening Post to ask how long pantomimes had been taking place in Leeds – and was…
The Leeds Riot Map Collection
Assistant Librarian Antony Ramm takes a look at a new addition to the Local and Family History department in the Central Library. The recent arrival in our Local and Family History department of a new map series is to be welcomed. This is the Leeds Riot Map collection, originally created by Tim Waters for a…
‘O, better were its banks assigned to spirits of a gentler kind’: The Ghost Stories of the Washburn Valley
This week’s guest author on the Secret Library is Andrew McTominey, a PhD student at Leeds Beckett University, who is co-supervised at the University of Huddersfield and funded by the AHRC Heritage Consortium. His thesis focuses on the reservoirs of the Washburn Valley, which service the city of Leeds, and the social and cultural impact…
Walking tours of the back-to-back houses, Harehills
University of York PhD researcher Joanne Harrison has continued her collaboration with Leeds Central Library’s Local and Family History department and the Compton Centre Community Hub, hosting a couple of events as part of the national Heritage Open Days weekend. She reports here on the tours and exhibition, how to get involved in the latest…
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