Leeds in the Nineteenth Century: The City Takes Shape

The nineteenth century saw the most extensive expansion of Leeds in its history, for Leeds was a boom town of the Industrial Revolution. It was a period of great wealth for the city, but unfortunately it was also a period of great poverty for many of the workers who flocked to its growing industries. Dickens once called Leeds, in 1847, "the beastliest place, one of the nastiest I know". As early as 1756 Horace Walpole described the town as "dingy" and in 1770 Thomas Gray described it as "smoky and ugly".

These are the penalties nearly every town had to pay when it grew too quickly as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Almost every town and city in the north of England which mushroomed during the Victorian era left a heritage of dirt and filth for its population of the twentieth century to put right and Leeds was by no means exceptional in this respect.

The discovery of steam power and the development of the locomotive in Leeds by Matthew Murray, certainly did much to alter the size of the town. The first journey of a locomotive to haul coal from the Middleton colliery took place on 24 June, 1812. The first railway network in the Leeds area was begun and 1834 with the opening of the Leeds-Selby line and by the mid-nineteenth century other lines had opened to Bradford, Dewsbury, Thirsk and Manchester. There were three stations: Wellington, opened in 1848; Central Station, opened in 1854; and New Station, opened in 1869.

New roads in the town and bridges over the river were made. Wellington bridge was built in 1818. The old blocks of houses, the Shambles and Back Shambles, in the middle of Briggate were demolished to widen the road in 1825, and gas lightening was introduced to the streets in 1819. The new road to Otley was constructed in 1841 in order to facilitate traffic going to Kendal by road, for stage-coaches still plied their trade despite competition from the railways, particularly to the north as the relief of the dales mitigated against railway construction.

Building accelerated rapidly and Hunslet Lane and Meadow Lane, in the south of the city, become well-to-do areas. Master and worker were now seeking separate areas in which to live, in contrast with the practice of the townsfolk of the eighteenth century, when merchants and workers lived side by side. By 1818 there were more than a hundred woollen mills employing ten thousand workers. John Marshall opened his famous flax mill in 1840 with a mill chimney disguised as Cleopatra's Needle.

In the 1840s there was a decline in the number of textile workers, but a rise in the number of workers in the other new industries, especially the engineering trades, which were being introduced to he town.

As its commercial buildings began to grow, so the civic buildings of Leeds were altered and added to. In 1813 a new Court House and prison was built at Mill Hill. The current Town Hall was built on the site of Park House and completed in 1858. When Armley Gaol was finished in 1847, the old Court House at Mill Hill became the Post Office and remained so until a new Post Office was built on the site of the coloured cloth hall in 1896. The old Court House was finally demolished on completion of City Square. A new Corn Exchange was built in Call Lane in 1857.

The market was eventually banned from Briggate in 1857 and moved to purpose built accommodation in Kirkgate following the demolition of the vicarage. Further markets were introduced: a leather market in 1824 and cattle market in 1855.

The area east of Briggate was developed tremendously and covered by houses and factories by the time Leeds Parish Church was rebuilt by Hook on its former site in 1841. Sheepscar Beck, seen clearly on maps of eighteenth century Leeds, was paved and piped away to provide building land for houses, which had become notorious slums in the Quarry Hill area even before the close of the century. Briggate itself was extended to New Briggate in 1868 and opened into North Street.

In 1816 Boar Lane was still a residential area, but fifty years later had become one of the main shopping centres in the town and altered considerably in 1867.

By 1834 the city had developed westwards as far as Hanover Square. Commercial Street was extended to Park Row between 1821 and 1826, and Bond Street, between Park Row and East Parade, was built about 1821 and originally called Russell Street . Trinity Street was up by 1806. A new Grammar School was built on the edge of Woodhouse Moor in 1859 and the reservoir on the Moor was completed and covered in during 1863. The oldest buildings in the present University, including the Great Hall and Baines Wing, were built when the University of Leeds was still the Yorkshire College in 1885. The old cemetery on Woodhouse Moor, which has now been largely built over by the new University extensions and named St George's Fields, was consecrated in 1835. By 1839 Victoria Road on the far side of the Moor had been constructed and at the Cardigan Road end of it was a zoo and botanical gardens.

Directly eastwards from Woodhouse Moor, just over a mile away, was the village of Sheepscar, which, even as late as 1831, was still a separate hamlet away from the main town. Several parks were also bought by the Corporation to provide some open spaces in the rapidly expanding town. Woodhouse Moor was bought in 1855, Roundhay Park in 1871, Woodhouse Ridge in 1877 and Hunslet Moor in 1878.

Other innovations which took place in the town during this century included the introduction of a tramway system in 1871 by a private company. The drainage system was vastly overhauled in 1850, a good twenty years after a serious outbreak of cholera in 1831. So bad had been the sewage system before that date, that when the town was cleaned up after an outbreak of cholera, seventy-five cartloads of sewage were removed from a cul-de-sac known as Boot and Shoe Yard in Kirkgate which housed a collection of slum cottage property. In 1795 this Yard contained twenty-two cottages, but in 1839 there were thirty-four, sheltering 340 persons.

The Shambles, Briggate

There was a bitter meeting in 1833 called by such eminent Leeds doctors as Charles Thackrah and Robert Baker to campaign vigorously for a proper sewage system, which in 1850 was eventually channelled into the River Aire near Temple Newsam. In 1870, the Corporation were directed to forbid sewage to pass into the river until it had been properly purified. It was not until about the same time that the courses of the many open becks below Swinegate were paved in and covered to prevent their use as open drains and tipping places. Water supplies to the town were very incompetent and unhealthy until the reservoir was constructed on Woodhouse Moor. However, by 1869 this reservoir had become inadequate and additional water supplies were sought from the Washburn valley near Blubberhouses and the high dales.

Poor working conditions in many of the mills, bad housing accommodation and the intense pollution of the air all contributed to a very high death rate which rose considerably with the increase in population. New cemeteries sprang up which became the targets for a highly organised group of body-snatchers who became known locally as the "resurrectionists". The cases of body-snatching are well documented and include an account of a box deposited "at the Bull and Mouth Hotel by the Duke of Leeds coach from Manchester in November 1831, the box being addressed to 'The Revd Mr Geneste, Hull. To be left until called for. Glass. Keep this side up." When opened by a curious servant the box was found to contain two corpses.

Body-snatching was so prevalent in some areas of Leeds that the townsfolk organised societies ("Grave Clubs") to cater for the relatives of the deceased persons and to devise measures to beat the body-snatchers. These measures include guarding newly interred bodies for five weeks and burying corpses twelve feet down with iron staves set into the earth at fixed intervals immediately above the coffin.

Education provision in the town gradually improved during the nineteenth century. In 1826 tertiary education began with Thackrah's private medical school which eventually was incorporated with the Leeds Medical School in 1831. The Wesleyan College at Headingley was founded in 1868 and a Roman Catholic seminary was established in the city in 1876.

The University of Leeds: Parkinson Building

The University of Leeds, which was given its charter in 1904, had its origins in the founding of the Yorkshire College of Science in 1874. Merger with the Leeds Medical School followed in 1884 and the combined college became part of the Victoria University in 1887. In 1904 the Yorkshire College became a university in its own right and today has an enviable international reputation for the high quality of its teaching and research. Rapid expansion of the campus occurred during the 1970s and continues today to provide accommodation for a student population fast approaching 20 000. Yet despite its position internationally, the University remains an integral part of Leeds and Leeds life, receiving civic benefits and contributing culturally and economically to the life of the city.

Social tensions came to the fore in the mid-nineteenth century fuelled by the atrocious living and working conditions. Richard Oastler became a notable campaigner for slum clearance and for the passing of the Ten Hours Act (1847) which restricted the number of hours children could work in the factories and mills. Rioting was a notable feature of Leeds life in the 1830s and 1840s. Reports of police armed with bayonets taking on the citizens of Leeds in the city centre were regular features in the local newspapers.

Yet high levels of unemployment were never a problem for nineteenth century Leeds on account of the great variety of trades which were founded. This was in contrast to many neighbouring towns who suffered following the declining fortunes of the textile trade. In addition to the woollen mills, the first of which were Benjamin Gott's Bean Ing Mills (1792), flax-spinning machinery was being produced by 1828 and railway engines were being made in James Kitson's Airedale factory in the 1840s. Other industries included machine-tool manufacturing, armament production for the Crimean War, clothing manufacture, the production of steam and hydraulic pumps and the manufacture of printing machinery. These industries brought great wealth to Leeds in the nineteenth century and it is not surprising that a plethora of banking establishments developed at this time too, the first to open being the Leeds, Skyrack and Morley Savings Bank in 1813.

The nineteenth century was undoubtedly the starting point of modern Leeds. It was the period in which Leeds grew to importance as a significant regional centre specialising in a diverse range of industries and one in which the urban morphology took shape. Mention has already been made as to the growing segregation of workplace and home, but distinct residential zones had started to emerge: separate areas for poorer and wealthier townsfolk and it is these changes which are examined next.

The Emergence of Functional Zones

Two historical developments can be viewed as having the most profound effect on the development of segregated land use in Leeds during the nineteenth century: the desire of the wealthy to live separately from the working classes and the rapidly expanding industrial areas, and the advances in urban passenger transport which allowed to city to expand freely and eliminate the need for congested residential and commercial accommodation in the town centre.

The segregation of residential areas began when the merchants' houses started to reject the town centre in favour of slightly detached sites. One of the first of these was Bischoff House, still standing at the foot of Hartley Hill in North Street. Although it still combined a home with a counting house, it was separated from its neighbours and from old Leeds by an open space and ornamental gardens.

Artisan housing of 19th century Leeds

For the less well-off it was still necessary to live in the central streets, where room for the expanding population was found by building both residential and commercial accommodation in what had been the gardens or backsides of the long, narrow thirteenth-century burgage plots, access being obtained by tunnels such as those which lead to some of the inn-yards that occupy these plots today in Briggate and Vicar Lane. The resulting problems of overcrowding, poor sanitation and health have already been discussed.

It was unlikely that good-class residential building would move east, for that way lay the mills of Sheepscar Beck, the riverside wharves and the marsh, while towards Quarry Hill and Richmond Hill the sprawl of working class cottages had already begun. Westwards the prospect was brighter. By 1725 two roads westwards were already built: Swinegate, near the river bank, with less elegant properties; and Boar Lane, fit for houses of aldermen who gardens ran all the way up to back on to those of the Head Row forming a green belt that came as far as the very western edge of the burgage plots in Briggate. This green belt remained intact until Albion Street was cut through in 1795, and the first development of fashionable new streets in the mode of Bath, Bristol and Bloomsbury took place a little further west.

Park Square, early 20th century

However, Leeds had been extremely unfortunate in the attempts to develop good-class open residential squares. The first, bounded by Park Row, East Parade and South Parade, was sacrificed under the pressure of land values, and its green interior began to be filled in, the first intruder being the new Magistrates Court House of 1811. Further north, Queen's Square was begun in 1806 but never completed to the original design; Hanover Square (projected in 1827), Woodhouse Square (1830) and Blenheim Square (1831) suffered the same fate. St Peter's Square, in the East End, did achieve completion (before 1815) but it was ill-placed, degenerated into slums, and has long since been obliterated.

Two types of ill-fortune dogged such enterprises as squares and terraces, more ambitious than single house building. They might be ill-timed, coinciding with slack periods of trade; or they might be ill-placed and their situation soon cease to be elegant. Mills arrived on their doorstep, and the southward vista became quite unlike what it had been when the windows of Park Place and South Parade were first curtained. The arrival of industry and eventually industrial streets, in what might otherwise have been the West End of Leeds, is of crucial significance in the nineteenth century. The fate of the West End was finally sealed when one of Leeds' large landowners, the Wilsons, sold land to the cloth manufacturers, Wormald and Gott, who then built the Bean Ing Mill. This mill, rather than gaining its power via a river goit, was to be a modern factory with a steam-engine and chimneys and a gas works of its own.

The workshops of the industrial belt of Leeds had always emitted smoke, but they did not use coal on the scale of a steam-engine, and they were located east and south of the town, so that the prevailing winds coming from the south-west took the smoke away from Briggate and the properties west of it. Gott's mill had a new technology but also a new position, west of the best residences of the day and it spilled its smoke on their doorstep. As Gott's machines multiplied the exodus began. In 1798 eleven of the thirty-eight members of the Corporation had addresses in the streets of the Park estate, seven of them in East Parade. After 1815 their addresses were more likely to be found in Headingley or Potternewton or the detached villas which they had built on the fields of Woodhouse, on a hill-slope and safely to the north. Surviving houses of this exodus include Beech Grove House, now the School of Education at Leeds University.

The industrial districts of Leeds, c.1895

With the exodus, some building plots in the Park estate remained empty. Park Square has the best remaining Georgian houses in Leeds but they do not form a complete unit. Later buildings simply fill the gaps left by the failure of the Georgian enterprise. The remainder of the estate met a worse fate. By 1824 the area had become packed with narrow streets, housing Gott's workers, and other mill building was permitted, even nearer to Park Square than Gott's. A few of these houses were built around courtyards, but the majority were back-to-backs. Back-to-back houses were a response to the need for cheap housing. They are found in a limited number of nineteenth century northern industrial towns, a distribution pattern not yet fully explained. Thirty thousand were built in Leeds by 1844. The price paid for this kind of development was frequent outbreaks of cholera. In a report presented to the House of Commons in 1842, death-rates were highest, not in the older houses but in houses no more than twenty years old, and in many cases less than a decade old.

By the time the first large-scale Ordnance Survey plan was released in 1847, streets of back-to-back housing had proliferated in Holbeck and Hunslet. They were found not only in the older area of working class housing east of the town on Richmond Hill and Quarry Hill, but along North Street and Camp Road almost as far as Sheepscar and Woodhouse Carr. Significantly, the same march of narrow streets and back-to-backs accompanied the multiplication of mills and engineering works on the north side of the river immediately west of the Park estate, along what is now Kirkstall Road and Burley Road.

The westward extension of industry and working-class housing must have been a principal factor in limiting the period of time during which a villa in Little Woodhouse provided a sufficient refuge from noise and pollution. It was a remarkably short period before the owners sold off their villas and the surrounding fields to speculative builders and then took refuge in the out-townships, on Woodhouse Ridge or in Headingley, Meanwood or Chapel Allerton.

As the wealthy retreated, the streets of artisan housing spread themselves. By the 1860s, the new streets had reached Woodhouse Moor, and by the 1880s they surrounded it. Thus, the social pattern of Leeds housing had been radically transformed. The better residential properties became concentrated on the northern heights and along the turnpike roads that came in from Otley via Headingley, from Meanwood and from Harrogate. On the other hand the areas served by Kirkstall Road, Burley Road and York Road became covered with low-grade back-to-back properties; and, of course, south of the river, industrial building and working class housing went in every direction. Superficially, the pattern of land-use had become sectoral almost fitting into the model of urban land use proposed by Hector Hoyt in 1939: distinct sectors of industrial land use with low and high-class residential areas radiating out from the old town centre. However, Hoyt's model stressed the role of radial transport routes in determining the pattern of land use and as yet the development of transport, particularly public transport, in Leeds has not been considered. It is to the role of the railways, trams, buses and ultimately the private car in shaping the new functional zones that is examined next.