by Louise Birch Day 7 of our Advent Calendar is all about Christmas Shopping. there is a commercial side to Christmas that many dislike, for some this is due to the affordability of gifts. Today’s entry recalls a toy fair that addressed this. These images show the annual Wykebeck ‘Family allowance Toy Fair’. Local residents…
Tag: christmas
Snowy Tramscapes by Peter Lapish
We’re kicking off the 2021 festive period with our Secret Library Leeds Advent Calendar. Everyday in the run up to Christmas we will bring you something from our heritage & special collections, all with a seasonal feel. Day 1 – Prints from the Leodis.net photographic archive as chosen by senior librarian Louise Birch Impressionistic watercolours…
New Year, Old Leeds
An extremely brief snapshot of the New Year period through the last century in Leeds, culled from our Leodis archive of historical Leeds photos…
Have Yourself A Merry Library Christmas
This week we hear from Librarian Louise Birch, who will be sharing a very special Christmas Carol from the Local and Family History Department. “Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the Library not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse” “The stockings were hung by the counter with care, in hopes that…
The First Leeds Panto?
To mark the forthcoming Christmas week, Librarian Antony Ramm offers a short investigation into the first pantomime performed in Leeds… In 1986 a reader of the Yorkshire Evening Post asked a simple question: What “records” were consulted for this answer is not made clear, but a previous article on the history of pantomime in Leeds…
Christmas and New Year in the Territorial Hospitals, 1917
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library Within three months of the outbreak of the First World War, Leeds had already seen its first influx of injured soldiers. These made their way to Beckett’s Park to what would become the city’s largest military care centre, the 2nd Northern General Hospital. At its…
An Armley Ghost Story for Christmas
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library “The ghost that turns up, annually, on the stroke of midnight on Christmas Eve is largely the invention of Charles Dickens and his imitators in fiction. But ghosts do prefer to visit their familiar haunts on dark winter nights – and, for some, Christmas appears…
Christmas books
Readers of this blog will surely agree that few things in life go together better than Christmas and reading a good book. And, while there can be nothing held against anyone who chooses otherwise, Christmas is surely the appropriate time to find yourself reading a good book about Christmas. A quick search of our library…
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