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a little more about Leeds
 The first mention of Leeds or Loidis as it was then know was made c730AD. Ledes as it became known was written up in the Domesday Book of 1086. In the early years the centre of the town existed as a modest cluster of buildings. A new town was founded in 1207 and the common spelling became Leedes. Trading well at that time the development of the cloth and later the woollen markets created the core of the modern city.
The population grew from 10,000 at the end of the seventeenth century to 30,000 at the end of the eighteenth. Leeds became one of the busiest and most prosperous urban centres in the north of England. With the industrial revolution the population grew to over 150,000 by 1840, the township transformed, it became the hub of a network of communications. As such Leeds was ideally placed to benefit from the development of an engineering industry and rode the development, making the city very successful. Coal was extracted on a large scale and the still functioning Middleton Railway, the first commercial railway in the world, transported coal into the centre of Leeds. At its heyday in 1893, Leeds became a city.
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