Leeds Audio Tour: The Bell, the Bandsaw and the Bridge

Ahead of you is a red-and-pink brick warehouse crowned with pierced parapets and little minaret-like turrets.

Look up. This odd, glorious thing starts with a machine. In eighteen fifty-eight, John Barran, a Leeds clothier and the son of a Hampshire merchant, watched a band-saw cut wood veneer and thought, in effect, why not cloth? He adapted it into a band-knife that could slice through eight, sixteen, even twenty layers at once. That was the moment ready-made tailoring stopped being a neat idea and became an industry.

Barran scaled fast. By the eighteen seventies he had two thousand machines, and by nineteen oh four he employed three thousand people, many using the new American Singer sewing machines. In eighteen seventy-eight, he asked the Leeds architect Thomas Ambler to give that industrial muscle a dramatic face, and Ambler obliged with this Hispano-Moorish showpiece. It is Grade II* listed, one of the higher levels of protection, and it earned that status in September nineteen sixty-three.

If you check the close-up in the app, you can see the minaretlets clearly. The originals were terracotta; the ones above you now are fibreglass copies from the nineteen seventy-six restoration. Even architectural fantasies sometimes need practical replacement parts.

The cloth was cut here, but much of the sewing went out to tiny workshops in the Leylands, the immigrant Jewish district between Vicar Lane, North Street, Eastgate and Regent Street. Leeds built its tailoring empire with invention at one end and punishing subcontracted labour at the other. Then came another immigrant story: in nineteen hundred, a fifteen-year-old Lithuanian called Meshe David Osinsky arrived in Britain alone. Leeds later knew him as Montague Burton. By nineteen twenty-one he was building Hudson Road Mills, which grew into the largest clothing factory in the world, with around ten thousand workers making more than thirty thousand suits a week.

When Barran died in nineteen oh five, thousands lined the streets of Leeds.

When you are ready, leave Park Square the way you came, cross East Parade, and walk into Park Row. On the south side you will spot the small grey-stone Gothic chapel, Mill Hill, and from there continue toward City Square.

Look for the broad paved triangle centered on a dark bronze horseman on a tall stone pedestal, with the pale stone former General Post Office and its clock tower forming the square’s most formal edge.

Under the paving around your feet lies one of Leeds’s best ghosts. Until eighteen ninety, this was the site of the Coloured Cloth Hall, built in seventeen fifty-eight: the biggest of all Leeds’s cloth halls. It was a huge quadrangle - a rectangular trading court - about one hundred and twenty-seven yards long and sixty-six yards wide, cut through by six internal streets and lined with one thousand eight hundred stands. On a busy market day, around one thousand seven hundred and seventy clothiers worked here. The whole thing cost five thousand three hundred pounds, which is roughly around a million pounds in today’s money... not bad for a building devoted to arguing over wool.

Then Leeds changed its mind. The Corporation bought the hall in eighteen eighty-nine for sixty-six thousand pounds - roughly nine million today - and demolished it to clear space for a new civic front door. The General Post Office opened on the eighteenth of May, eighteen ninety-six, and the council chose the name City Square because Leeds had just become a city. The first plan included tram waiting rooms and public lavatories for arriving visitors. Colonel Thomas Walter Harding looked at that and, bless him, decided Leeds deserved a little more swagger. He hired William Bakewell to give the place the feel of an Italian piazza, with statues and trees.

If you fancy it, the before-and-after image in the app shows that leap from muddy construction site to civic stage rather neatly.

And that brings us to the man on horseback. Edward the Black Prince had no real connection to Leeds at all, which caused a fair bit of muttering. Harding defended the choice by calling him the flower of English chivalry, a model of manly and unselfish virtue. Sculptor Thomas Brock spent seven years creating him, using the prince’s effigy and armor in Canterbury Cathedral as his guide. No British foundry could cast the statue at that size, so Belgium did the job. Then they shipped it to Hull and brought it to Leeds by barge along the River Aire. Crowds cheered when Leeds unveiled it on the sixteenth of September, nineteen oh three.

Around him are Alfred Drury’s eight lamp-bearing nymphs, unveiled in eighteen ninety-nine and immediately denounced in critical letters to the Yorkshire Post. Leeds, it turns out, could survive industrial smoke, but not a bronze nude without commentary. Two types alternate: Morn holds a lamp in her right hand and flowers in the other; Even holds her lamp in the left, with her free hand raised to her head.

Drury also sculpted Joseph Priestley here in nineteen oh three, a neat link to Mill Hill Chapel on the square, where Priestley had preached. If you want a closer look, there’s a good image of Priestley on your screen. Henry Charles Fehr’s James Watt joined him the same year. Watt had no specific Leeds link either, but he embodied the engineering power that turned Leeds from cloth town into full-blown city.

So this square tells the whole story in one glance: cloth hall below, civic ambition above, and industry muscling in between. When you’re ready, head to Mill Hill Chapel on the east side of the square. We’ll pick up Priestley’s trail there.

On your left is a pale stone Gothic chapel with a steep gabled front, tall pointed windows, and a slender spire lifting above the entrance.

Look up at that spire for a second... because one of the sharpest minds in eighteenth-century Britain once preached here. Joseph Priestley served as minister from seventeen sixty-seven to seventeen seventy-three, and while he stood at Mill Hill he nudged this congregation toward Unitarianism, a form of Christianity that prizes reason, conscience, and belief in one God rather than the Trinity. Priestley also believed churches should educate their young, not just scold them. During his Leeds years, his scientific work turned toward chemistry and pneumatics, which is just the study of gases with a less friendly name. A year after he left, he isolated oxygen. Not a bad side project.

That tells you a lot about Mill Hill. This was never just a place for quiet piety. It began as a Dissenter chapel in the sixteen seventies, when Dissenters meant Protestants outside the Church of England, and it grew into one of the oldest and most respected nonconformist congregations in the country. Over time, it became so packed with civic influence that people nicknamed it the “mayors’ nest.” Which sounds cozy, but also faintly dangerous. Prominent Leeds families like the Luptons, Marshalls, and Kitsons supported it, along with merchants, industrialists, and politicians. The same world of trade and manufacturing we keep bumping into on this walk also prayed here, argued here, and backed campaigns from the abolition of slavery to women’s suffrage.

The building in front of you is younger than the congregation. In eighteen forty-seven the old chapel came down, and Henry Bowman and J. S. Crowther replaced it on the same site in eighteen forty-eight. They chose what became known as Dissenting Gothic: all the moral seriousness and upward reach of Gothic church design, but claimed by people who did not fancy taking orders from the established church. Builders brought the stone from Meanwood and Potternewton and spent seven thousand three hundred pounds on the project... something like a million pounds in today’s money. Leeds later gave it Grade II* listed status, one of the higher levels of protection, which is the official way of saying, “hands off, this matters.”

If you fancy it, check the before-and-after image in the app; the streetscape shifts around it, but Mill Hill keeps anchoring the square with a kind of stubborn calm.

And this corner mattered. Park Row became Leeds’s banking street from the eighteen sixties onward, lined with banks, insurers, and the machinery of respectable money. Beckett’s Bank, Leeds’s first bank, established in seventeen fifty-eight, stood nearby in a grand Gilbert Scott building from eighteen sixty-seven. So this chapel sat right beside the city’s ledgers and loan books, close enough to hear the rustle of commerce and, now and then, answer back.

Take a look at the interior photo on your screen and you’ll see the Gothic rebuild carries on inside as well, right down to the pulpit. The original Victorian pews are still there, and the plaque outside marks another first too: this was the first place of worship in central Leeds to conduct a same-sex wedding.

If you ever catch it open-usually Wednesday from noon to two or on Sunday mornings-it is well worth a peek inside. Now cross Park Row and walk into the square - we’ll meet you at the equestrian Black Prince in the centre, before we turn south toward Round Foundry.

Look for sturdy red-brick industrial blocks with rectangular windows and heavy double doors, gathered around courtyards on Water Lane where the original circular foundry itself has long since vanished.

This site starts with a partnership, not a single genius in a flash of glory. In seventeen ninety-five, engineer Matthew Murray joined David Wood and set up works here in Holbeck. Then James Fenton and the millwright William Lister came in with the money and backing to make the whole thing real. Together, between seventeen ninety-five and seventeen ninety-seven, they created the Round Foundry, one of the world’s first specialist engineering foundries. That matters because this was not just a place that made iron things... it was a place built to solve industrial problems on purpose, day after day.

Murray designed a huge three-storey circular engine-assembly building here, the rotunda that gave the foundry its name. He even built himself a house next door, heated by steam, which locals called Steam Hall. A man who brings central heating to his own house before most people had decent drains was not exactly lacking in confidence.

And confidence paid off. This is where Leeds helped crack the practical steam locomotive. In eighteen twelve, Murray built Salamanca here for John Blenkinsop’s Middleton Railway. Salamanca was the first commercially successful steam locomotive. Not the first idea, not the first experiment that sort of coughed along and hoped for the best... the first one that truly worked in commercial service. It even predated Stephenson’s Rocket by seventeen years.

Salamanca also carried some smart engineering. It had two cylinders, unusual at the time, and it used a rack-and-pinion system, which simply means a gear on the engine meshed with a toothed rail beside the track. That gave it grip enough to haul heavy loads from the Middleton collieries. The Middleton Railway became the first commercial railway to use steam locomotives successfully, and a lot of that story began right here behind these walls.

If you check the picture on your screen, image three shows one of the surviving early buildings at one-oh-one Water Lane, linked to Murray’s works from roughly seventeen ninety-five to eighteen oh two. These survivors are fragments, but they still hold the shape of the old enterprise.

Salamanca took its name from the Duke of Wellington’s victory at the Battle of Salamanca in eighteen twelve. Its own end was less triumphant: six years later, its boiler exploded and destroyed the engine. Early steam power was brilliant, but it did not do gentle.

Murray died in eighteen twenty-six, aged sixty, and people buried him at St Matthew’s Churchyard in Holbeck. His workers topped his tomb with a cast-iron obelisk made here at the foundry. That feels fitting... the men who built engines with him also built his memorial.

One more twist: in eighteen seventy-five, fire tore through the site and destroyed the great rotunda itself, along with other original buildings. What remains, including listed structures and fabric dating back to seventeen ninety-eight, now forms the Round Foundry Media Centre. Creative and digital businesses moved into old workshops and foundry yards, and the redevelopment won a shelf full of awards. If you glance at image one, you can see how the preserved buildings still frame the courtyard like a working set of industrial bones.

When you’re ready, walk west along Water Lane and turn into Marshall Street - the long six-storey brick building on your right is Marshall’s Mill of seventeen ninety-one.

On your left, Marshall's Mill is a long red-brick block, six storeys high, with strict rows of windows and a slightly projecting central section that breaks the flat facade.

Stand on Marshall Street and look up... this place began in seventeen ninety-one to seventeen ninety-two, when John Marshall started the mill complex here. He had already teamed up with Samuel Fenton and Ralph Dearlove in Marshall, Fenton and Company, first leasing a mill at Adel, then moving to Water Lane and building a six-storey, water-powered mill that drew from nearby Hol Beck to spin yarn.

This was the opening move in John Marshall's flax empire: Marshall's Mill from seventeen ninety-one, then Temple Works from eighteen thirty-six to forty, a spinning shed so vast it was described as the biggest single room in the world, almost two acres, with sheep grazing on its grass-covered roof to keep the air humid. Industrial grandeur, Leeds-style. By eighteen fifty, Marshall's mills used ten percent of all the flax imported into Britain.

Leeds had long thrived on wool, but Marshall helped apply cotton machinery to flax, and the result was enormous. This site became the biggest flax mill in Europe. At its peak, Marshall had enough power here to run seven thousand spindles and employ around two thousand factory workers.

But scale always came with a bill. Two-fifths of Marshall's workforce were young women aged thirteen to twenty, and about one fifth were under thirteen. Before the Sadler Committee, a parliamentary inquiry into factory conditions, Leeds mill worker Elizabeth Bentley said she started at six years old. She worked from five in the morning till nine at night when the rooms were busy, went home covered in dust, and said she had been strapped severely. Her job as a doffer meant stopping the frames, removing full bobbins, carrying them off, fitting empty ones, and starting the machinery again.

If you fancy it, have a quick look at the before-and-after image in the app; the mill stays recognisable while the city around it changes completely. The site was comprehensively redeveloped in the late nineteen nineties, and now it serves as office space.

When you're ready, keep walking down Marshall Street - the Egyptian temple front coming up on your left is Temple Works.

On your right, look for a long stone building with a flat, temple-like front, sloping walls, and a heavy Egyptian cornice crowning the facade.

Temple Works is Leeds in full industrial swagger... dressed as ancient Egypt. John Marshall commissioned it between eighteen thirty-six and eighteen forty, and engineer James Coombe, painter David Roberts, and architect Joseph Bonomi the Younger gave him an Egyptian Revival mill - meaning a modern factory wrapped in the language of ancient temples. This frontage borrows from temples at Antaeopolis and Edfu, while the great factory behind it took cues from Dendera. There was even a chimney designed like an obelisk. Because if you are spinning flax in Leeds, why not borrow a little Pharaoh.

At its opening in June eighteen forty, Marshall celebrated with a Temperance Tea for two thousand six hundred workers. Respectable, efficient... and probably less exciting than some had hoped. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can catch the temple styling more clearly in the stonework.

Inside stood what people called the biggest single room in the world: three hundred and ninety-six feet long by two hundred and sixteen and a half feet wide, nearly two acres under one roof. Around a thousand people worked that floor. The roof above them carried eight inches of earth and grass, and yes, sheep grazed up there. Marshall's team even devised the world's first hydraulic lift to get them onto the roof, because the grass helped hold moisture in the mill below, stopping flax thread from drying out and snapping. The old interior scene on your phone hints at the scale.

But grandeur came with a hard edge. Workers labored seventy-two hours a week in heat and humidity; about forty percent were young women aged thirteen to twenty, and about twenty percent were under thirteen. Marshall did provide baths - cold free, hot one penny - and tradesmen's shops, which feels caring right up until you remember the hours.

After Marshall died, the business declined and ended in eighteen eighty-six. The building suffered a major collapse in two thousand and nine, but its Grade I listing helped secure restoration money: twenty-five million pounds in twenty twenty, then another ten million in February twenty twenty-five to bring it into public ownership for the future British Library northern site.

When you're ready, walk back along Marshall Street, cross Water Lane and head east along Hunslet Road - about ten minutes - to the Art Deco brick block known as The Tetley. Public access can be limited, so check the app before you set off.

Directly in front of you is an oval stone building with a ribbed dome, walls patterned in diamond-cut rustication, and semicircular porches framed by chunky Tuscan columns.

Look up first. That dome is the show-off here, and for once the building has earned it. Hull-born architect Cuthbert Brodrick, the same man behind Leeds Town Hall, gave Leeds this Italianate design in the early eighteen sixties; he completed it in eighteen sixty-three, and traders opened it as the city’s new Corn Exchange in eighteen sixty-four. If you check the image on your screen, you can see how boldly that roof rises above the curved façade.

Brodrick did not invent the dome from thin air. He copied it quite deliberately from the Bourse de commerce in Paris, designed by François-Joseph Bélanger and François Brunet and finished in eighteen eleven, itself standing on the site of the older Halle au Blé, the old wheat market. Leeds, in other words, borrowed a bit of Paris and put it to work selling grain. Sensible, really.

Inside, the drama continues. Historian Asa Briggs said the roof feels like “the inverted hull of a ship,” and once you see the interior image, that comparison sticks. But this was not architecture for posing. Farmers and corn factors - grain merchants, basically - gathered on the main floor to strike deals. A cast-iron gallery ran around above, separating first-floor offices from the trading floor, while corn sat in basement stores below. Elegant, yes... but also ruthlessly practical.

Trade here faded after the late nineteenth-century farming slump hit British agriculture hard. In the late nineteen eighties, Speciality Shops plc rescued the building and turned it into retail space, and new owners relaunched it in November two thousand and eight as a boutique shopping centre. Above the doorways, look for the carved stone keystone heads representing countries Leeds traded with - a nice Victorian way of saying, “business reached far beyond Yorkshire.”

Turn left out of the Corn Exchange and walk along Cloth Hall Street into Kirkgate - the seventeen eleven First White Cloth Hall is on your left... then continue on to Third White Cloth Hall, Crown Street, about four minutes away. If you want to step inside later, it usually opens from ten to six most days, later on Thursday, and from half past ten to half past four on Sunday.