Historically in the West Riding of Yorkshire, the history of Leeds can be traced to the 5th century when the Kingdom of Elmet was covered by the forest of ‘Loidis’.

Leeds was a manor and township in the large ancient parish of Leeds St Peter, in the Skyrack wapentake. The Borough of Leeds was created in 1207; four centuries later, the inhabitants petitioned Charles I for a charter of incorporation, which was granted in 1626 and incorporated the entire parish, including all 11 townships, as the Borough of Leeds.

In the 17th and 18th centuries Leeds became a major centre for the production and trading of wool. Then, during the Industrial Revolution, Leeds developed into a major industrial centre; wool remained the dominant industry but flax, engineering, iron foundries, printing, and other industries were important.

Leeds handled one sixth of England’s export trade in 1770. Growth was accelerated by the building of the Aire and Calder Navigation in 1699 and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal in 1816. The railway network constructed around Leeds, starting with the Leeds and Selby Railway in 1834, provided improved communications with national markets and an east-west connection with Manchester and the ports of Liverpool and Hull gave improved access to inter-national markets.

Marshall’s Mill was one of the first of many factories constructed in Leeds from around 1790 when the most significant were woollen finishing and flax mills. Manufacturing diversified by 1914 to printing, engineering, chemicals and clothing. Decline in manufacturing during the 1930s was temporarily reversed by a switch to producing uniforms and munitions during World War Two.

In 1866 Leeds, and each of the other townships in the borough, became a civil parish. The borough became a county borough in 1889, giving it inde-pendence from the newly formed West Riding County Council and it gained city status in 1893. In 1904 the Leeds parish absorbed Beeston, Chapel Allerton, Farnley, Headingley cum Burley and Potternewton from within the borough. In 1912 the parish and county borough of Leeds absorbed the parishes of Roundhay, Seacroft and Shadwell.

In 1801, 42% of the population of Leeds lived outside the township, in the wider borough. Cholera outbreaks in 1832 and 1849 caused the authorities to address the problems of drainage, sanitation and water supply.

Residential growth occurred in Holbeck and Hunslet from 1801 to 1851 but, as these townships became industrialised new areas such as Headingley, Potternewton and Chapel Allerton were favoured for middle class housing. The Leeds Improvement Act 1866 sought to improve the quality of working class housing by restricting the number of homes that could be built in a single terrace.

Data provided exclusively to this magazine by www.thegenealogist.co.uk, extracted from the site’s census collections, confirms the initial importance and then decline of the textile trade.

In 1841, the top 20 occupations included cloth dresser, flax spinner, shoemaker, clothier, woollen weaver, dressmaker, tailor, weaver, flax dresser and dyer. By 1911, industrialisation had wiped out many of these manual trades. The top 20 still includes tailor and dressmaker, but now we see sewing machinist, and more general domestic roles such as housekeeper, charwoman, house painter and clerk. In those 70 years, the city’s population soared from 150,000 to more than 234,000.

TheGenealogist has also crunched surname data for the city. In 1841, the names in the top 20 for Leeds which are not in the top 20 for England as a whole – ie showing more distinctive ones for the region – include Thompson, Atkinson, Harrison, Jackson, Stead, Wilkinson, Rhodes, Naylor, Whitaker and Watson. In 1911, the first four of those appear, plus Watson; the others are replaced by Shaw, Simpson and Richardson, plus Cohen reflecting a growing Jewish population.

TheGenealogist.co.uk has many records covering Yorkshire, including parish registers, wills and visitation records, and has Leeds-specific directories covering 1830, 1861, 1907 and 1923.

Leeds has a branch of the West Yorkshire Archives Service; Leeds Museum, which was revamped in 2008, explores the history of the city.

Meet Leeds Researchers