Suburban Leeds: A comparison of Headingley, Woodhouse, Burley and Kirkstall as Suburbs of Modern Leeds (1949-1981)

By Carol Winteringham

This dissertation is over 50 years old. Written painstakingly by hand at a time when there were no computers or the Internet, Carol Winteringham takes you through a thorough first-hand analysis of urban developments in north-western Leeds. She takes into consideration the housing, industry and shopping facilities, looking at their historical dev

• Language: English
• Publisher: ThreePeppers Publishing
• Release date: Jan 31, 2022
• ISBN: 9781838494360

Book preview

Foreword

It is now 2021. This dissertation is over 50 years old. It is something I wrote while I was studying to become a school teacher as part of my final studies. It takes into consideration the housing, industry, and shopping facilities in four northern suburbs in the city of Leeds. It looks back at their historical development but concentrates on the situation up to 1968 as well as future plans up to 1981. At the time when this was written there were no computers or the Internet, so everything was painstakingly written by hand and information about the shops and industries was gathered first hand. Looking back, I must have walked miles to complete the maps explaining the types of shops and industries. This area of Leeds is completely different today and has developed even further, so many places or street names may no longer exist. I decided to put this work to print as I hope this study may prove useful to curious students or just be interesting reading for those of you who know this part of Leeds.

Carol Winteringham

Introduction

My home town is Leeds and I live in the suburb of Headingley. Leeds is a large complex city comprising of several suburbs, originally known as Out-Townships.

In this study the aim is to consider the modern development of four of these suburbs. There are a large number of suburbs to choose from, several of which have developed at remarkable speed during the past few years, such as Seacroft. However, this study will concentrate on suburbs within my immediate home area: Headingley, Woodhouse, Burley and Kirkstall, so as to study adequately in this field.

These four areas are well established suburbs of Leeds and unlike the modern suburbs of towns which are concise, separate units, these suburbs have become mingled, and it is decidedly difficult to establish where one suburb ends and another begins.

The only common factor linking them together is that they are all very old parts of Leeds; as we shall see later, all of these four parts are included in the zone of older housing. However, these four suburbs are included in Leeds City Council’s Review of the Developmental Plan (1961-1981). The planning considered industry, housing, shopping facilities, routeways and transport.

This study is examining the four suburbs at a very interesting stage of development. It is now 1968 to 1969 that we are beginning to see some of the fruits of their planning.

The study aims to indicate the overall plan for the four suburbs up to 1981, but what is more important is that it shows the situation at present. It presents the ideal and the realistic. I hope this will reveal several problems to the geographer - involving slums, rate of slum clearance, influx of students and immigrants and the rate of development.

In conclusion, the study will be concerned with whether the planners will be successful in their re-development and improvement plans of the four suburbs in relation to other factors such as the age of the area and people’s preference for the modern suburbs of Leeds; the areas under study are rapidly becoming dominated by immigrants, students, and poorer families.

Is this a declining part of Leeds?

The suburbs have all developed differently and for a different purpose, so to study them some historical background must be included, to give insight as to what each suburb originated for. The differentiation of the suburbs will be introduced in a separate chapter which will include a little history, whereas the main part of the historical information and background can be found at the end of the study in the Appendices. The study, whilst looking at the development of the four suburbs from 1949 to 1981 and attempting to grasp the situation at present, revealing several developmental problems, it will have a central theme of the differences in the suburbs. The differentiation will be made through comparison, in terms of how the development is different for each suburb and the differing rates of development. Some areas in the suburbs have been developed far more than others. In order to make a reasonable comparison of the suburbs, they will not be considered individually. There will be chapters dealing with the main issues of suburbia, such as housing and shopping facilities and all the suburbs will be compared against each other, in each issue.

Chapter 1: Location of the Four Suburbs

All of the four suburbs under study, Woodhouse, Kirkstall, Burley and Headingley are to be located on the North and North-west side of the city of Leeds, as