Georgian Leeds: A Guided Walking Tour of the City Centre

When people think of Leeds, they usually picture a Victorian city of enormous mills and grand civic buildings. A century before Victoria came to the throne, though, Leeds was already growing into the city we know today, and lots of that earlier story is still tucked away in the centre of town.

Join me, Rachel Arbury, a historian and Leeds resident of 20 years, for a two-hour wander through the city centre to see Leeds through the eyes of its Georgian inhabitants. We’ll discover the places where people lived, worked, worshipped and had fun.

I’ll share the stories I’ve collected along the way, like the cloth merchants who did a fortune’s worth of business in a single hour, parties that carried on until three in the morning, hot air balloons launching from a cloth hall courtyard, and a famous surgeon with an inventive, and very gory, way of raising money for Leeds' first infirmary.

You don’t need any prior history knowledge to come along. Questions are very welcome, and if you have an interesting fact about a place, I’d love to hear it!