City centre tours:

• Walking through the centuries: from origins to 21st century – how a riverside hamlet became a city

• Waterways and bridges of Leeds – criss-crossing the waterways, central to the story of Leeds over the centuries

• Women in & of Leeds – how women have gained more rights & prominence

• Ace architects of Victorian Leeds – the main designers and their legacy 

• Public art – subjects, media, artists, funding, attitudes & engagement

• What a lot of terracotta – decorative tiles and whole schemes for building façades, late C19, early C20 and a few examples from C21

• Art Deco – architecture of Leeds between the wars

• Rooftop Leeds – view the city from on high, and while at street level look up to rooftop styles and features. Finishes with a High Rise cocktail.

• The warehouse district of Leeds west end – how a Georgian residential neighbourhood was transformed

• Tippling or Temperance? Brewing, drinking & the alternatives in the history of Leeds

• Time in Leeds – layers, duration, measuring, money

• The making of Wellington Place – from meadows to rails to retail to offices

• A continuing yarn: textiles, clothing and fashion in Leeds – sites of significance for cloth and garment making and trading

• A long yarn  presentation/online only – wool and woollen cloth in the history of Leeds

• Protest & riot – exploring the reasons for and sites of uprisings & disorder 

• Hidden gems and curious corners of Leeds city centre – fascinating features that you might not normally notice

• How green is our city? – towards resource efficiency + wellbeing for people & nature

• Spreading the word – writing, printing, publishing and reading in Leeds

• Backsides of Leeds: dressed up in front and bare behind – exploring the less respectable sides of the city centre

• Leeds Town Hall  presentation/online only (our most striking historic building, but not accessible for now) – the making of a Victorian landmark and how it's been adapted down the decades

• City Square  presentation/online only – how has this prominent civic space changed over the centuries? (A fascinating story but hardly a walking expedition, so to cover the detail I've developed a presentation)

• Roll up, roll up: Leeds, a trading city – from hand-made cloth to high end fashion ... and beyond

• Leeds in the 1820s – life in a late Georgian town

• Death trap to digital hub: diseases, treatments and healthcare since the 18th century - health challenges and responses over 250 years

• The emergence of the office district – from quills in chambers to purpose-built premises

• East End, West End – the expansion of Leeds in the early industrial period 

• Grit and grime to exotic cladding: the building stones of Leeds What is the city made of and why?

• Modernist architecture: dreams and nightmares? Part I – Leeds city centre; Part II – education and health 

• Lost Leeds: demolished gems and vanished dreams A ghost tour of sorts to some sites where the sights are not what they once were and to places where radical changes were not implemented

• A geographer’s reflections on architecture: reading the city – buildings in their setting and how to make sense of cities

• Light in Leeds – sources, uses, cultural & economic trends associated with illumination

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Beyond the old city centre:

• Local college to global campus – the making of the University of Leeds

• Cradle of Innovation: Holbeck & Hunslet – the industrial heartland south of the River Aire

• Leeds South Bank – invention & reinvention from pre-industrial to industrial and onwards. The tour can have a more or less historic/contemporary & futures focus.

• Chapel Allerton: hamlet to suburb – an open-air exhibition of suburbanisation

• The changing face of Woodhouse – an ancient hamlet that has seen intense waves of change 

• Gipton – an idealistic housing development of the 1930

• Roundhay Park – from Medieval deer park, to private pleasure grounds, to 'the people's park' 

• Colourful Kirkstall: from Wellington Bridge to the viaduct – discover where dyeing, tanning, foundries and terraces used to be and what's there now

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Coming soon: ​

• Beyond the city centre: tours of Richmond Hill; Little Woodhouse & Hyde Park; Kirkstall lands in west Leeds
• Fur, feathers, wool and scales – Leeds creatures real and imagined
• Waterways to wifi: flows of cloth to flows of bytes and international connections

• Bright sparks – innovators of the city centre

• Steamed up – the railways come to and from Leeds

• Terraces to towers – large-scale housing in Leeds 

• Power to the people – from coal to renewables, feudalism to universal franchise