ABBEY HOUSE MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat: 12 – 5pm
Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last admission: 4.30pm
Address
Abbey Walk
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
ABBEY HOUSE MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat: 12 – 5pm
Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last admission: 4.30pm
Address
Abbey Walk
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
LEEDS ART GALLERY
Opening Hours
Mon: Closed
Tues -Sat: 10am – 5pm
Sun: 11am – 3pm
Address
The Headrow
Leeds
LS1 3AA
LEEDS CITY MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: closed (11am – 5pm on bank holidays)
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat & Sun: 11am – 5pm
Address
Leeds City Museum
Millennium Square
Leeds
LS2 8BH
Ticket Provider
LEEDS DISCOVERY CENTRE
Opening Hours
Visits by appointment/special event only.
Free public store tours are now available by booking in advance. Please call or email us.
Address
Leeds Discovery Centre
Off Carlisle Road
Leeds
LS10 1LB
LEEDS INDUSTRIAL MUSEUM
Opening Hours
Mon: Closed (10am – 5pm on bank holiday Mondays)
Tues – Fri: 10am – 5pm
Sat – Sun: 12 – 5pm
Last admission one hour before closing.
Address
Canal Road
Leeds
LS12 2QF
KIRKSTALL ABBEY
Opening Hours
Mon: closed (10am – 4pm on bank holidays)
Tues – Sun: 10am – 4.30pm
Last admission: 4pm
Address
Abbey Road
Kirkstall
Leeds
LS5 3EH
Ticket Provider
LOTHERTON
Opening Hours
Open Daily
Estate opens: 7.30am
Hall: Open (Downstairs only) 10am-5pm
Wildlife World: 10am – 5pm
Estate closes: 7pm
Last entry 45 mins before estate closing time
TEMPLE NEWSAM
Opening Hours
House: Tues – Sun: 10.30am – 5pm
Home Farm: Tues – Sun: 10am – 5pm
Last entry 45 minutes before
THWAITE WATERMILL
Address
Thwaite Lane
Stourton
Leeds
LS10 1RP
LOGOS, FOOTER LINKS, COPYRIGHT
We may request cookies to be set on your device. We use cookies to let us know when you visit our websites, how you interact with us, to enrich your user experience, and to customize your relationship with our website.
Click on the different category headings to find out more. You can also change some of your preferences. Note that blocking some types of cookies may impact your experience on our websites and the services we are able to offer.
These cookies are strictly necessary to provide you with services available through our website and to use some of its features.
Because these cookies are strictly necessary to deliver the website, refusing them will have impact how our site functions. You always can block or delete cookies by changing your browser settings and force blocking all cookies on this website. But this will always prompt you to accept/refuse cookies when revisiting our site.
We fully respect if you want to refuse cookies but to avoid asking you again and again kindly allow us to store a cookie for that. You are free to opt out any time or opt in for other cookies to get a better experience. If you refuse cookies we will remove all set cookies in our domain.
We provide you with a list of stored cookies on your computer in our domain so you can check what we stored. Due to security reasons we are not able to show or modify cookies from other domains. You can check these in your browser security settings.
These cookies collect information that is used either in aggregate form to help us understand how our website is being used or how effective our marketing campaigns are, or to help us customize our website and application for you in order to enhance your experience.
If you do not want that we track your visit to our site you can disable tracking in your browser here:
We also use different external services like Google Webfonts, Google Maps, and external Video providers. Since these providers may collect personal data like your IP address we allow you to block them here. Please be aware that this might heavily reduce the functionality and appearance of our site. Changes will take effect once you reload the page.
Google Webfont Settings:
Google Map Settings:
Google reCaptcha Settings:
Vimeo and Youtube video embeds:
The following cookies are also needed - You can choose if you want to allow them:
You can read about our cookies and privacy settings in detail on our Privacy Policy Page.
Privacy and data
Samson Fox and Leeds Forge: From the Banks of the Aire to the Cote d’Azure
Collections, Industrial HistoryDirectly outside my office at Leeds Industrial Museum is an impressive, almost life size, oil portrait of an apparently satisfied industrialist sporting a ruddy complexion and what might today be termed a ‘hipster’ beard. The individual is Samson Fox. The portrait shows Samson standing in what at first sight seems to be a picturesque landscape.
The painting hangs in a rather dimly lit staircase and it would be easy to miss the partial background depiction of an industrial scene. This is no generic scene, but is in fact Leeds Forge, where Fox made his fortune. In front of the works are the River Aire and the course of the Leeds & Liverpool canal, each were – in their own way – crucial to the development of industry in Leeds and further afield.
Samson Fox by G. Jones-Barker, Leeds Museums & Galleries
In an effort to avoid over-familiarity breeding contempt, I thought I would do Samson the courtesy of re-capping his story. Fox is probably best known for his invention in 1877 of the corrugated boiler flue. “So what?” might be a typical response, but when it is considered that the design was almost universally adopted by the British Admiralty, the French Navy and many major steam ship lines, the impact of this Leeds-built product becomes apparent. This remarkably simple, but until that point, elusive, development involved hydraulic presses to corrugate standard flues, giving them improved heat transfer and compressive qualities. The workforce of Leeds Forge were proud enough of their totemic product that their dedication on the Fox portrait was painted on a moulded likeness of a Fox Corrugated Flue.
Dedication to Samson Fox executed on a likeness of his corrugated flue, Leeds Museums & Galleries.
Fox made significant advances in other areas of transport, most notably in railway rolling stock design. Thanks to hugely powerful steam hammers of the type pioneered by James Naismyth (whose other claims to fame incidentally included throwing his Bridgewater Foundry business card into the crater of Mount Vesuvius), Fox was able to conceive of large, weight saving single piece castings for a host of applications from wagon bodies to wagon bogies. In 1882 Fox patented the first pressed steel underframes for railway rolling stock. Fox’s pioneering work influenced the development of pressed steel underframes and all-steel railway cars in the USA following his establishment of a plant in Chicago.
All-steel Leeds Forge grain wagon made for South African Railway, Leeds Museums & Galleries.
These far-from-glamorous products represented essential marginal gains in the endless search for greater economy and efficiency in the transport of goods in the late 19th and early 20th century. Leeds Forge produced huge numbers of all steel wagons which were lighter than their wood and steel predecessors, which meant that less coal was required to haul them. Later accounts state how Fox observed that a lightweight bicycle could carry the same weight person as a heavy weight version.
Leeds Forge also had a well-earned reputation by building complete railway carriages, many of these for premier luxury passenger routes overseas. Most noteworthy was the contract to build 40 all-steel cars for the Companie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, an order worth a cool half a million pounds sterling to Leeds Forge. The Leeds Mercury trumpeted this news in July 1922 with the headline ‘Leeds Touches a New Industry’. The article went on to speculate that ‘to ride in these cars must be to experience splendour and luxury similar to that provided on the best ocean liners’ and that ‘one is in a first class modern hotel in either case’.
A Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits carriage at Buchs station, between Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Leeds Forge pioneered the company’s iconic blue carriages (Image: Murdockcrc: Creative Commons)
A Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits carriage at Buchs station, between Switzerland and Liechtenstein. Leeds Forge pioneered the company’s iconic blue carriages (Image: Murdockcrc: Creative Commons)The Leeds Forge carriage designs also featured the innovation of single-occupancy cabins aimed at business and other travelers desirous of privacy. The possibilities for intrigue and secrecy offered by this discreet new accommodation feature may not have been lost on Agatha Christie when she laboured over her 1928 novel The Mystery of the Blue Train.
Sleeping compartment made by Leeds Forge in a mix of night and daytime layouts, Leeds Museums & Galleries
It might be hard to comprehend that iconic objects like the Blue Train carriages were born on the banks of the River Aire at Armley and Newlay. Fragments of the main Leeds Forge site pictured in Samson Fox’s portrait still survive – mainly in the shape of tall retaining walls looming over the Leeds & Liverpool canal. Ultimately, the scale of the operation built up by Fox was key to the Forge’s products being greatly sought after worldwide. The ability to shape and fold steel as easily and neatly as a waiter on The Blue Train would fold a serviette, was clearly a matter of pride for Leeds Forge employees and owners alike. Ironically however, the prestigious order turned out to be a financial disaster for the company, leading to the closure of the site in 1929.
By John McGoldrick, Curator of Industrial History.
Find out more about our Industrial History collection.