This year for Heritage Open Day (Sept 11-20) we are doing things a little bit differently: instead of opening up our building, we are opening up our city centre for you to explore and enjoy while finding out more about this year’s theme of Hidden Nature. Leeds is a city of green spaces with large…
Tag: parks
The Adam & Eve Garden Today
Local history librarian, Ross Horsley, revisits the site of the former Adam and Eve Garden on Woodhouse Moor. A couple of weeks ago at the Secret Library, we looked back to the early decades of the twentieth century, when a miniature Garden of Eden – home to its own Adam, Eve and Tree of Knowledge…
Adam & Eve in the Garden of Leeds
Local historian, Bill McKinnon, remembers a pair of local celebrities who resided in the Hyde Park area for forty years… The garden that has formed the setting for the Victoria Memorial on Woodhouse Moor since 1937 used to be known as the the Adam and Eve Garden. It was named after statues of a young…
The Owl on Woodhouse Moor
Bill McKinnon, local historian and activist, looks back over the life of the Woodhouse Moor Owl – a sculpture so mysterious, we can’t even find a photograph of it! “The Owl … will mount his pedestal today as an emblem of Leeds,” wrote John Lee in the Leeds Times on Saturday 14 April 1883. “The figure of the…
Where Was Leeds Maze?
by Ross Horsley, Local and Family History, Leeds Central Library When Carver thought about the maze he could picture it very clearly. The thick green walls of leaves, the scuffed brown pathway that may once have been lawn, the iron trellis that was pulled across the entrance at six o’clock each evening. But apart from…