The Urban Geography of Leeds
an historical analysis of urban development
Mike Lewis
Head of Geography, Northamptonshire Grammar School
Introduction: Leeds as a Tool for the Study of Urban Geography
Leeds in the Eighteenth Century: Beginnings of Urbanisation
Leeds in the Nineteenth Century: The City Takes Shape
The Emergence of Functional Zones
The Role of Urban Passenger Transport in Leeds' Urban Geography
Leeds in the Twentieth Century: Urban Renewal
Socio-Economic and Ethnic Segregation
Leeds is one of the largest cities in England and the foremost industrial city of the West Yorkshire conurbation. Its population in 1981 stood at 696 714 and with Bradford forms a metropolitan area supporting more than 1 million people. Although a large proportion of its population are engaged in the tertiary sector Leeds is primarily an industrial city. Its rapid growth during the nineteenth century mirrors any town which was endowed with the raw materials of the Industrial Revolution: coal, iron ore and cheap labour. The particular strength of the West Yorkshire towns was the manufacture of cloth, an industry which began on a small scale high up in the Pennine valleys and then later moved down to the growing mills of Halifax, Bradford and Leeds where engineering and coal mining were fast becoming important.
The importance of these traditional industries has gradually waned to be replaced with a more diversified industrial structure and one in which service industries are becoming pre-eminent and, in this respect, Leeds has emerged as the service centre for much of the surrounding area. Many of the components of the service sector in Leeds have received national acclaim particularly in areas of health care provision and university education.
It is partly Leeds' ready accessibility that has contributed to its large sphere of influence. Leeds is almost midway between London and Edinburgh and between Merseyside and Humberside. The M1 motorway reaches almost into the centre of Leeds and the M62 transpennine motorway crosses to the south with spurs into Bradford and Leeds. There is also still a considerable rail network and an airport. The Aire and Calder Navigation provides a significant water transport link from Leeds and Wakefield to the Humber estuary, but the Leeds-Liverpool Canal is now only of historical and recreational interest. The 'Metro' system allows for subsidisation of rail and bus services and consequent cheap fares throughout West Yorkshire and this encourages widespread public usage of urban passenger transport and freedom of movement within and between towns.
The early development of industrial activities within and around Leeds has produced environmental problems such as spoil heaps, obsolete mill buildings and water and air pollution, together with large areas of poor quality housing. However, a few miles to the north lie Lower Wharfedale and Ilkley Moor that, together with a rich diversity of recreational and cultural amenities, form the basis of a growing tourist industry and which has formed the backdrop to such popular television series as 'Last of the Summer Wine' and 'All Creatures Great and Small'.
Alternative images of Leeds associated, on the one hand, with declining industries and urban dereliction and, on the other, with scenic beauty and tourist attraction, are both facets of the truth. Different people will call to mind different assocations. For example, Leeds may be known to different individuals for 'The Good Old Days' on television, for the Leeds International Piano Competition, for the Rolling Stones last concert in Roundhay Park, or perhaps for the fortunes of Leeds United soccer team or for cricket matches at Headingley. Of course, after undertaking fieldwork different students will still have their own very personal perceptions of the geography of Leeds, but all are likely to gain a deeper understandings of what made and continues to make Leeds the economic and social heart of its region.
Leeds in the Eighteenth Century: The Beginnings of Urbanisation
The eighteenth century in Leeds is notable in that it paved the way for the great social and economic upheaval which began at the end of it, and continued all through the next century. That great change, the Industrial Revolution, completely altered the face of West Yorkshire, and to a marked extent its character, bringing as it did an influx of workers from all over England. It changed Leeds and its neighbourhood from a rural township to the great industrial city of today. It altered West Yorkshire from a moorland wasteland pitted here and there with odd pockets of industry and smallholdings to a complex and highly organised industrial community with over three-quarters of the country's population depending for their living on its industries.
Leeds was
well suited for the developing textile trade. There was plenty of
pasture land in the upland dales where sheep could be raised;
there was ample soft water for cleansing the wool; though the
roads were poor, the rivers around Leeds were sufficiently
navigable for transporting goods to Goole and Hull; and, finally
as the eighteenth century progressed and the Industrial
Revolution got well under way with its new inventions of steam
powered machines, the coal-field just south of Leeds provided yet
another natural source of power for working the new machinery.
These factors, coupled with an invaluable tradition of
cloth-making skills, gave Leeds an unqualified advantage in her
development as the foremost textile town in eighteenth-century
Yorkshire.
Leeds
Coloured Cloth Hall
The cloth made by the handlooms in the many dales farmhouses around Leeds was sold to the Leeds merchants for them to trade and sell. Since medieval times a cloth fair had been held on the Bridge over the Aire, but in the 1680s this site had become so congested that it was moved to Briggate. In 1711, largely through the influence of Ralph Thoresby, a cloth hall was built in Kirkgate and trade grew to such proportions that a new and larger hall was built near Mill Hill for the sale of coloured cloth. A white cloth hall was opened in the Calls in 1775 following closure of the Kirkgate site. Still the trade grew, to such an extent that the Cloth Hall was moved yet again, in the nineteenth century, to King Street. From these cloth halls, material was sold to distributors all over the country.
Although woollen cloth-making was the staple industry in Leeds during the eighteenth century, it was not the only one. Other trades were practised and even today the healthy economic stability of the city's commerce is due to the variety of industries in Leeds. It is significant that Leeds is one of the very few areas in northern England which has not suffered a population decrease as a result of the drift south and an important factor in maintaining this population has been the wide variety of jobs available when one trade or another has suffered recession.
Leeds in the eighteenth century was famous for its pottery, manufactured since medieval times. Linen too was produced in large quantities. John Marshall founded a famous linen-making firm in Adel which moved to Holbeck in 1840. Engineering, also, came to play a more and more important role in Leeds during the eighteenth century. Iron had been worked by the monks at Kirkstall in their forges and was smelted at Middleton and Horsforth. The discovery of the use of coal and coke, in the smelting and casting of iron, made Leeds by virtue of its coal seams a natural location for the siting of foundries and ironworks. The Low Moor Ironworks date from 1788 and Bowling from 1789.
One important feature of the late eighteenth century , which greatly facilitated the rise of industries in Leeds, was the tremendous improvement in means of communication. In 1775 Leeds Corporation set about improving the condition and paving of the town streets. Oil lamps were rigged up in Leeds in 1791, gas not being introduced until 1819. The Old Bridge over the Aire at the bottom of Briggate was widened several times. Communications outside the town with other centres of commerce were also improved by felling large areas of woodland to create new roads. By the late eighteenth century much of the forest to the north of Leeds had been cut down and replaced by arable farms.
Poor parishes outside Leeds found it impossible, however, to maintain the stretches of new roads within their boundaries, and so in the late seventeenth century a Turnpike Act was passed allowing tolls to be levied on those who used the roads. Toll-bars existed until the late nineteenth century.
It was in the late eighteenth century that the canal system in the Leeds area was built. The canal connecting Leeds to Liverpool was built in stages between 1770 and 1815 and the River Aire was made navigable to Leeds at the end of the seventeenth century. In the 1760s the Aire was connected to the Ouse by the Selby canal. The advent of the railway and steam locomotive was foreshadowed by the building of a railway for transporting coal from Middleton collieries to Leeds in 1759, though it was not until 1812 that a steam locomotive actually drew the trucks to Leeds on this line.
With better means of communication it was a natural consequence that, as Leeds became more readily accessible to the rest of the country and London, news coming from there and abroad would be more eagerly sought after in this growing commercial centre. Leeds' first newspapers included 'The Leeds Mercury', started in 1718, and 'The Leeds Intelligencer', started in 1754, both papers later merging in 'The Yorkshire Post' in 1939.
Leeds in the eighteenth century continued to be centred on the main thoroughfare, Briggate. However, Briggate was quite different from the modern road. From Leeds Bridge to Kirkgate it was wide, with houses standing well back in spacious gardens. Above Kirkgate the road narrowed and buildings stood in the middle of the street called The Shambles and Back Shambles, places where livestock was butchered in the open. The market was held in the widest section of Briggate which also contained the pillory and stocks, last used in 1837. Markets were also held at the top end of Briggate and on the Lower and Upper Head Rows for livestock. The cloth market, held in medieval times on the bridge at the bottom of Briggate, and then from 1684 to 1711 in the market in lower Briggate, was in 1785 held in the white cloth hall near the Calls close to the present Corn Exchange.
The vicarage stood in its own grounds between Kirkgate and Vicar Lane. The first infirmary, founded in 1767, stood in Kirkgate for a few years until a new one was built in 1771 near the coloured cloth hall to the west of the town. Vicar Lane in 1775 extended northwards to just above Lower Head Row, to a short street aptly named Towns End which was the last real street of the town and formed the main road out to Harrogate. It was in Towns End that the old Grammar School stood until it moved to Woodhouse Moor on the site of the University's new Western Campus in 1859. The Quarry Hill district was practically open countryside.
To the south of the Parish Church ran a little path called the Calls, still existing as a street today. Westward from the Calls, at the foot of Briggate, was the old bridge, demolished and widened several times during the eighteenth century. Swinegate was in much the same place it is today, leading off westwards from the old bridge; but in the area now covered by City Station, Neville Street, Sovereign Street and the Queen's Hall, there were a number of mills and fullers' yards adjoining the river. Swinegate ran as far as Mill Hill as did Boar Lane, then a well-to-do suburb of the town. From the western end of Boar Lane, only nine yards wide in places, about where City Square is today, Kirkstall Abbey could be seen, as there was no building due west from that point apart from the large buildings of Mill Hill.
The old Bradford Road was a continuation of the Upper Head Row and is now covered by Westgate. Almost all the land between Bradford Road and Boar Lane consisted of fields or orchards; that is an area now bounded by Park Row, The Headrow, Lands Lane, Trinity Street and Boar Lane.
The open space west of Lands Lane was filled in soon after 1775. Park Row seems to have been built up first, then South Parade and East Parade; these three streets, together with the infirmary and the coloured cloth hall, formed an open square by the beginning of the nineteenth century. Park Place appeared on maps in 1781 and Park Square in 1806. Albion Street was built towards the end of the eighteenth century to join Boar Lane and Upper Head Row and was the site of the first Music Hall (1792).
Out of the north-west was Lidgate, the road to Kendal, now the lower part of Woodhouse Lane considered in 1775 to be particularly healthy, as it was somewhat removed from the river and the air was "remarkably salutary and bracing". About 1785 Providence Row, in the neighbourhood of present Cobourg Street, is described as a fashionable and an "entirely sylvan" suburb, "a favourite location for young ladies' boarding schools".
Beyond the town to the north lay Woodhouse Moor, with its tiny villages of Woodhouse and Little Woodhouse. Hunts were held on the Moor in the eighteenth century and hounds kennelled in the locality of the University's western campus. Adjoining Woodhouse Moor was Chapeltown Moor where the first recorded cricket match in Yorkshire was played in August 1765 between Leeds and Sheffield.
No real segregation of land uses was evident in the Leeds of the eighteenth century. Merchants did not spurn a residence in the very heart of the town. Even elaborate townhouses were nearly all in the central streets with warehouses and counting houses at the rear. For a merchant, his home and the place of work coincided, as they did on a lesser scale for the retail butchers of the Shambles and Back Shambles or for a family weaving-enterprise with the looms in the upper chamber.
The system of land tenure was based on medieval burgage. The lands of the town came under three manors: Kirkgate, Whitkirk and Duchy, and were leased as small plots, burgages, comprising a house, yard and garden (garth). These burgages ran the full length from Briggate to Lands Lane. As the population of the town grew, commercial and residential accommodation was provided in the gardens of these burgages with access facilitated often by tunnels from the main street beneath existing houses. By the mid-nineteenth century these burgages became notorious for overcrowding, cholera epidemics and a high birth rate. Sanitary reformers of the late nineteenth century gave national publicity to these crowded tenement yards, and conditions in the Boot and Shoe Yard (near Kirkgate market) were often cited. In 1795 this Yard contained 22 cottages, but in 1839 there were 34, sheltering 340 people. Pressure also built up behind the houses of the Upper Head Row.
This overcrowding spawned the development of better quality residential areas beginning with the fashionable streets of Park Row, South Parade and East Parade forming the elegant Park Square. However, these early fashionable areas were short lived as the pressure of land values brought about the invasion by other land uses, beginning with the Magistrates Court in 1811, and other areas towards the north were sought after for high-class housing. In many cases what were elegant neighbourhoods in the eighteenth century had, by the beginning of the nineteenth century, been either taken over by industry or degenerated into slums. It is, in fact, the rapid expansion of the nineteenth century which laid the foundations for the pattern of land use observed in Leeds today and it is this period which we turn to next.
