This week we hear from independent researcher Danny Friar, who offers a brilliant and sensitively-researched excavation of the Georgian era, revealing fragments of a hidden, but universal, history… Ten years ago a discussion of the Georgian period may have brought up names such as Lord Horatio Nelson, Captain James Cook, William Wilberforce and Jane Austen….
Tag: Leeds
The Places We Live: Local History Collections Around Leeds
As part of Local and Community History Month, Librarian Antony Ramm briefly explores our local history collections stretching all around Leeds, and introduces a new guide to stock relating to Rothwell… As readers of this blog may already know, the Local and Family History department at the Central Library in Leeds houses a huge collection…
Leeds Sanitation & Sewers
In today’s post our Senior Librarian for Local Studies & Research, Louise Birch, explores the history of Leeds Sanitation taking, from the local studies collection, David Seller’s work; ‘Hidden Beneath our Feet: The Story of Sewerage in Leeds’ (1997) as the main source material. Sewers and sewerage are something many of us take for granted….
Paintings of Burley
This week on the Secret Library we hear from guest author Jonathan Hooper. Jonathan is an incredible painter, who is here to share some of his paintings of Burley and the inspirations behind them. You can see more of Jonathan’s artwork and process on his website. I am a painter – my subject is the…
West Leeds Boys High School
As part of our ongoing Armley Treasures series, librarian Helen Skilbeck looks at the early history of the West Leeds Boys High School. This is a companion piece to the West Leeds Girls High School blog post of August 2020 by Josh Flint. The school opened in September 1907 and was ‘planned not as a…
The Chapeltown Uprising of 1981 – commemorating and investigating.
This week sees the 40th anniversary of the uprising in Chapeltown, where the weekend of 11/12th of July saw social unrest around Roundhay Road and Chapeltown Road. This coincided with other protests that year in Brixton, Liverpool, Manchester and Birmingham as well as smaller uprisings in Bradford, Halifax and Hull. Leeds Libraries, West Yorkshire Archives,…
LGBT+ Leeds Curated Gallery
The Leodis website was relaunched in March 2021 and we are pleased to announce that the LGBT+ Leeds curated gallery is now back on the site. This was created in 2020 by West Yorkshire Queer Stories as a guide to LGBT+ history in Leeds. Featuring a variety of people, places and protests, the curated gallery…
A Brief History of Leeds #2: The 16th-century
The second in a series of articles exploring the history of Leeds, using books and other stock resources held in the Leeds Libraries collections. For all the entries in this series, see our dedicated page. We ended the last entry in this series by commenting that 15th-century Leeds “clearly had some developing to do,” given…
The Secret Library | Leeds Libraries Heritage Blog 