First Leeds Cloth Hall

Details

SE3033SW
714-1/78/227
16/06/83

LEEDS
KIRKGATE
(South West side)
Nos.98 AND 100
First Leeds Cloth Hall
Formerly Listed as:
KIRKGATE
Nos.98-101 (Consecutive) former First White Cloth Hall)

II*

White cloth hall. 1711 with C19 and C20 alterations to use as
shop. Brick, part rendered, stone dressings, slate and
concrete tile roof. Quoins.
2- and 3-storey U-plan composed of a range parallel to the
street and set back from it, and a hipped roof wing at each
end extending forward to street edge, the courtyard so formed
infilled by later building.
Street frontage: 2 first-floor windows to each wing: 4-pane
sashes, wedge lintels; smaller windows just below eaves on 2nd
floor have stone sills. C20 shop fronts to ground floor.
Courtyard elevations of 2 storeys, having a round-headed
arcade on plain stone piers with moulded bases and caps to the
ground floor and round-headed windows in brick arches with
keystone above, the openings now blocked or containing later
windows and part of the walling rebuilt to a different design.
INTERIOR: original roof structure of king-post type with
braces from the posts to the ridge pole survive in part.
HISTORICAL NOTE: the first cloth hall to be built in Leeds,
catering for the producers of undyed cloth who had previously
sold their goods at the general cloth market in Briggate.
Plans for the construction of such a building were made in
1710, when Ralph Thoresby, a merchant clothier and Leeds
historian, referred in his diary to his visit to Lord Irwin at
Temple Newsam. The proposal to build a secure and sheltered
building for the trade was spurred by the construction of a
hall in Wakefield during that year and the building, opened 29
May 1711, included storerooms for the clothiers of individual
townships and hamlets.
Thoresby described it as 'a stately hall, built on pillars on
arches in the form of an exchange, with a quadrangular court
within'. Cossins' map (1725) shows the White Cloth Hall set
back from Kirkgate and suggests that the principal facade was
towards the south; 2 routes: High Back Lane and Low Back Lane,
linking it with the warehouses, dyehouses and wharves on The
Calls. Those 2 lanes ran along each side of a large tenter



field, the site in 1776 of the much larger third White Cloth
Hall in Crown Street (qv), the 2nd hall being built in Meadow
Lane in 1758 (demolished). The first hall was converted to an
alehouse and shops and in the early C19 James Boyne built 2
houses across the front of the courtyard, the 2 arms of the
hall were converted to houses. Not examined in detail; fully
recorded by West Yorkshire Archaeological Unit c1985.
(Burt, S & Grady, K: The Merchants' Golden Age: Leeds
1700-1790: 1987-; Cossins, J: Map of Leeds, reprinted by
Thoresby Society 1989: 1725-; West Yorkshire Archaeology
Service Report: Michelmore, D: First White Cloth Hall and
Contemporary Buildings in Leeds).

Listing NGR: SE3045833414

Legacy

The contents of this record have been generated from a legacy data system.

Legacy System number:

465922

Legacy System:

LBS

Sources

Books and journals
Burt, , Grady, , The Merchants Golden Age Leeds 1700-1790, (1987)
Michelmore, D, West Yorkshire Archaeology Service Report in First White Cloth Hall and Contemporary Buildings in Leeds, ()

Other
Title: Map of Leeds 1725 Source Date: 1989 Author: Publisher: Surveyor:

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