ABSTRACT
The slum problem of Leeds was created in the decades around 1800, when a population of some 30,000 was first doubled, and later tripled. Before this its poorest citizens were accommodated in the yards of inns and better houses fronting along Briggate, Kirkgate and the ‘Headrows’ that marked the northern limit of the town (see figure 1). In 1776 there began a westward expansion of rented upper-class houses built in parades and squares on the London pattern. But Briggate and land to the east became reserved for new working-class housing, much of it of the cheapest kind. The earliest back-to-backs were built by 1790, in Union Street and four other short streets off Vicar Lane, the work of a terminating building society. This house-type probably originated in the narrow yards formed from the old burgage plots of the main thoroughfares, and within a few years it was beginning to be used by building speculators, who by building them in closed courts found that they could conveniently save the cost of roads and drainage. 1 At the bottom of Union Street was the Lady Beck which was in memory, if not in fact at this time, ‘a crystal stream where trout and grayling swam’. 2 On its far side rose the height of Quarry Hill, a distinctive triangular stretch marked out by the beck on the west, the road to York on the south and the lane called Quarry Hill on the north. In earlier times it had been an informal pleasure ground where people resorted to drink spa waters or watch bull-baiting. The fact that even now there were gardens and orchards upon it no doubt made it a plausible site for another venture in residential planning — St Peter's Square, the second of the series of Leeds squares, built in 1789, also by a terminating society. Its houses, as described in a bill of letting of 1804, were ‘well adapted for the Residence of a Genteel family, having a garden and every requisite convenience immediately adjoining’. 3 They, in fact, accommodated families like that of Richard Oastler, who was born there and whose father was the steward of a large estate.
