We welcome back Heritage Volunteer Andy Armstrong this week, for the fifth in his series of blog articles exploring the rich archives of Leeds City Council papers and records available in our Local and Family History department. As usual, Andy’s research is accompanied by a research guide and a comprehensive spreadsheet of all our stock…
Tag: Heritage Volunteers
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…
Black History Month: Leeds United’s first Black footballer
This week we welcome guest author Pete Slater. Pete is one of a small team of volunteers working on a project based on football fandom. He traced the following story during his research using our local newspaper archive, as part of that project work. We publish this piece as part of Black History Month. For…
Journeying Through Time: Unveiling Leeds’ Transport Heritage from the Archives
This week on the blog we hear from volunteer Andy Armstrong, who has travelled through literally thousands of items in our collections to bring you this article… Hi – my name’s Andy Armstrong and I joined the library as a volunteer last autumn to help search through the vast collection of material produced by Leeds…
Volunteers’ Week 2023
The first week of June is Volunteers’ Week – an annual celebration of the contribution millions of people make across the UK through volunteering in their communities. We want to celebrate (and thank profusely) our very own Heritage Volunteers who have been beavering away at various tasks in the Local and Family History Library for…
A reminder that you can’t find everything on Google
This week we hear from a previous Secret Library contributor, and now Library Heritage Volunteer, Tony Harcup, with a short but fascinating – and very important! – sequel to his earlier article… It was only after writing a Secret Libraries blogpost about the Yorkshire origins of the National Union of Journalists (https://secretlibraryleeds.net/2022/04/04/what-about-the-workers/) that I began…
Leeds Zoological and Botanical Gardens: A Brief History
This week, Kyle Thomason, a heritage volunteer at the Central Library, writes about the long lost Zoological Gardens in Headingley. The Leeds Zoological and Botanical Gardens were unknown to me until a few months ago. However, when I was younger I regularly saw what I thought was a mini Castle, over grown with no information…
Captain Cook and Doctor Priestley: A Library Tale for Our Times
Heritage volunteer Tony Scaife imagines a secret meeting of great minds in 18th century Leeds… Having borrowed a copy of Peter Whitley’s Lord North: The Prime Minister Who Lost America from Leeds Libraries, I became intrigued at the similarities between the 1770s and today. As his many Whig critics claimed, Lord North’s bungling government negligently lost…
The Secret Library | Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog 