As part of the Trivial Pursuits project, which has been put in place to celebrate Leeds 400, the library put on a series of ‘Treasures Showcases’ for each of the Trivial Pursuit categories. In August, the themes were Geography and History and items from our Special Collections department were taken out to be displayed and…
Category: Treasures & Discoveries
Leeds400: the 1926 Tercentenary ‘Old Leeds’ exhibition
Over the next few weeks we’ll be posting a few more articles than usual, all tied to our exhibition Leodis: 400 Years of Leeds in the Leeds Libraries Collections. The exhibition can be seen in our City Library until November 11. This week, our focus is on the equivalent exhibition one hundred years ago, in…
Treasure Handling Session – Entertainment, Arts and Literature
This week we welcome Kirsty to the Secret Library blog. Here she highlights a recent event at Leeds City Library that showcased some of our lesser seen items. From 25 July – 30 August 2026 Leeds was transformed into a giant board game to celebrate a landmark moment in its history. People were encouraged to…
Heritage Open Days 2025
This week we take an in-depth look at events at Leeds Central Library during the Heritage Open Days Festival 2025. Local History Open Day Running on Saturday 13 September, 11.00am – 2.00pm in the Local and Family History Library, the Open Day is a chance for librarians to exhibit some of our most cherished and…
Unearthed: The Power of Gardening
Unearthed: The Power of Gardening is a new, free exhibition at Leeds Central Library running from 10 September – 29 October 2025, exploring the transformative, enriching and sometimes radical power of gardening. Inspired by the British Library’s major exhibition and following successful visits to Armley, Rothwell and Compton Road Community Hubs and Libraries, Unearthed celebrates…
A Dream of Leeds (Part 2)
Becky Bavill brings us the second part of this fascinating story of a musical life in Leeds… In the first part of this article, I had identified the author of the music and her family. What I was interested in now were the two people Amelia’s father felt were important enough to him or his…
A Dream of Leeds (Part I)
This week on the Secret Library Leeds we welcome Library and Digital Assistant Becky Bavill for a deep-dive into the family history archives, all sparked by some cross-departmental collaboration with our colleagues in the Music Library… In a box in the music department is a printed pianoforte piece. It’s called ‘The Dream’ by the late…
Ghost Stories and Weird Experiences (Part 2)
Halloween is officially here so today we continue with some more gruesome tales from the spooky scrapbook compiled by Edwin Hick. As mentioned in Part 1, this scrapbook is officially called ‘Ghost Stories and Weird Experiences, Life after Death etc.’ and is full of newspaper cuttings from the local newspapers detailing weird and wonderful stories…
