Leeds

Leeds. The earliest mention of Leeds is in Bede's Ecclesiastical History as the region of Loidis in the 7th cent. The derivation of the name is unclear. It is mentioned in Domesday but not as a place of particular importance. But by 1207 it had been granted a charter by the lord of the manor and it developed with the cloth trade from the 14th cent. onwards, less as a manufacturing centre than as a market for the surrounding villages. A bridge across the Aire is first mentioned in 1384 but may have existed much earlier. Charles I gave Leeds a charter in 1626 and its assessment for ship money in the 1630s suggests a town of importance—£200 as against £520 for York and £140 for Hull. Cromwell gave the town parliamentary representation but Leeds lost it again at the Restoration and until 1832 had to be content with the influence it exerted in the elections for the county. In 1698 Celia Fiennes found Leeds ‘esteemed an excellent town of its bigness in the count(r)y, its manufactures in the woollen cloth, the Yorkshire cloth in which they are all employed, and are esteemed very rich and very proud’. Before Defoe visited the town in the 1720s, improvements to the rivers Aire and Calder had encouraged export through Hull of cloth and coal: ‘large, wealthy and populous’ was his comment; ‘the cloth market not to be equalled in the world.’ Communications were further improved by the opening of the Leeds and Liverpool canal, in stages, between 1770 and 1816. The first railway, in a complex network, was the Leeds to Selby line in 1834, followed by lines to Derby (1840), Manchester (1841), and Thirsk (1849). By 1801 Leeds was the fifth largest provincial town with a population of 53,000 and its prodigious expansion in the 19th cent. took it into fourth place by 1861, having overtaken Bristol. The Kirkgate covered market, opened in 1857, housed Marks's Penny Bazaar in the 1880s—the forerunner of Marks & Spencer's. In the 20th cent., as the cloth trade moved to Bradford, Leeds diversified, with engineering, chemicals, banking, and services becoming important. The construction of the M1 and M62 motorways in the 1970s, when canals and railways had faded, preserved its importance as a great commercial centre, the crossroads of the north–south and east–west highways.

J. A. Cannon