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…
Category: Yorkshire History
Thrones & Tomes: Exploring the History Behind Game of Thrones
by Josh Flint, Local and Family History, Central Library Leeds Central Library is excited to be presenting the Game of Thrones-inspired Thrones & Tomes event. This fun-filled event will include games, a quiz, authentic 15th century music and talks on medieval subjects including food and nutrition and the dreaded sea-monsters of the middle ages. This…
Wo Wo Lol Lol: The Eccentric John Broughton
By Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library It’s often via interactions with customers that we come to appreciate the stories behind some of the treasures in our collections. One we’ve recently discovered a little more about – thanks to the correspondence of the author’s great-great-granddaughter – is the 1828 book, Poems; Moral, Sentimental and…
The English Civil War in Yorkshire
by Josh Flint, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Did you know that the some of the defining events of the English Civil War occurred in Yorkshire? The Local and Family History department has researched and created a new information leaflet chronicling the role of Yorkshire during the Civil War. The leaflet details a…
John Ogilby: Road Maps & Measuring Wheels
by Karen Downham, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Among the many maps in Leeds Libraries’ collection is John Ogilby’s Britannia Depicta, published in 1675, a landmark in the mapping of England and Wales, and the first national road atlas of any country in Western Europe. It was a publication that would bring about…
Meeting the Ghosts of the Brontë Family
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Central Library In his book Contested Will: Who Wrote Shakespeare? (2010), James Shapiro makes the point that “every literature professor is in the business of speaking to the dead” and that, by extension, “communicating with the dead is what we all do…[e]very time we pick up a volume of Milton…
Brrr! Warm Up with our Arctic Archives
by Antony Ramm, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library This is an entry in our Read More series. These are ‘long-form’ articles, where staff offer a curated and detailed look at areas of our book collections, usually based around a specific theme or subject. These posts aim to guide the interested reader through to those books that…
Celebrating the Yorkshire Festival
As part of the 2014 Yorkshire Festival we wanted to show you some of the Heritage Yorkshire stock we have here at Leeds Central Library. ‘Yorkshire Painted & Described’ by Gordon Home was acquired by the Leeds Public Libraries Reference Library on the 9th June 1956 with 71 illustrations accompanying Home’s description of his tour…
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