This week Librarian and Digital Assistant, Alexandra Brummitt, takes a look at how Victoria Square was used during the Second World War. Over the past century the space outside Leeds Town Hall has been used for everything from memorials to protests to Christmas markets. During the Second World War this space was bustling with activity…
Flaubert and his parrot are in Egypt
Welcome to 2025! Our first article on the Secret Library Leeds this year Librarian Antony Ramm’s brief look at the breadth and depth of books in our Central Library stacks, using Gustave Flaubert as a case study… For reasons that are not worth going into here, I have recently been reading a pile of London…
Reading 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 the history of Leeds Libraries elsewhere on the blog… Hi. My name’s Andy Armstrong and I have…
A Seasonal Secret Library Selection
For our last post of the year – a curated list of previous articles on the Secret Library Leeds about all things Winter and Christmas. Plenty of reading material here to get you through the next two weeks! We shall return with our regular programming in the first week of January. Season’s greetings to all…
The Gledhow Hall Scrapbook: A Library Treasure
This week we welcome Library and Digital Assistant Sue Stepan for an in-depth look at one of the Central Library’s real treasures – the Gledhow Hall Scrapbook. Sue also reveals a new resource that will prove beneficial to researchers of soldiers and medical staff involved in World War I. Do you have an ancestor or…
A Brief Tour of Clarendon Road
This week Librarian Antony Ramm offers a very short tour of Clarendon Road in Little Woodhouse, based on a walk delivered to library staff on Monday November 25 2024. Some of this article and tour is based on information posted in a previous blog post about Little Woodhouse, and relies heavily on details given to…
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…
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