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 | Open Bank Holiday Mondays and throughout summer holidays
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
A Tale of Teazles
Collections, Featured, Industrial History, VolunteersFrom your seat at the bar you see the landlady greet the two ‘rustic-looking’ gents like old friends, and bemoan how time has flown-by since last year. With pints in hand they take a table at the far end of the room, the landlady turns to you and says ‘they’re tazzle-men from Somerset – customers’ll start arriving within t’hour. It’ll get right busy!’
If you were in The Angel pub in Leeds on an early spring evening between 1830 and 1850 you may well have seen such an encounter. The ‘tazzle-men’, coming mostly from the south west of England or from the West Riding were teazle sellers who used the Inns of Leeds and Huddersfield to meet their customers (and at times to store their goods).
The Angel Inn in 1907, courtesy of Leeds Library and Information Service
The Angel is a pub in Leeds city centre that is still today pretty much unchanged since Victorian times. Other Inns that the dealers used have long gone, though the since modernised ‘Ship’ and ‘Horse and Trumpet’ are still there. But what is a teazle? And what were they used for?
Teazles at Leeds Industrial Museum
You have most likely seen teazles growing wild on waste-ground or as ornamental plants. They are up to 2 metres tall, with egg-shaped flowers on separate spiky stems. In summer their flowerheads wave in the breeze, the hundreds of pale blue florets on each head attracting all sorts of insects. If you look closely at the pairs of spiky leaves, you see that where they join the stem they form a sort of bowl that catches rain-water, and in this a variety of insects get trapped and drown. On poor soils the plant is able to benefit from absorbing the products of decomposition in these water-filled bowls. At the end of summer the mature spiky flowerheads contain hundreds of seeds which are a favourite of goldfinches. It’s the ‘soft but spiky’ nature of the dry flowerheads – in particular the large central one called the ‘king’ – that made this plant so useful.
Since Roman times or earlier, the process of ‘raising’ the surface of woven woollen cloth was used to ‘soften’ the surface. The cloth would be stretched over a frame and brushed with teazles that had been fixed into some sort of wooden holder. The word ‘combing’ is reserved for the process of separating and aligning fibres prior to weaving. The brushing pulls-out the ends of some fibres, to produce a softer surface and make it more suitable for blankets or coats for example.
Raising Gig at Leeds Industrial Museum, which mechanised using teazles to raise the nap on cloth as part of the finishing process. The first recorded use of the term ‘raising gig’ was found in the Leeds Intelligencer newspaper.
During the 18thcentury the process was refined by cloth manufacturers in the West Country to produce a particularly fine finish. This entailed brushing fine woollen cloth in several stages – an operation that could take days for a single length of cloth. In the early 1800s this labour-intensive process was gradually being replaced by a mechanised one, in which rows of teazles mounted in frames were fixed round a rotating drum (a ‘gig’) over which the cloth was pulled. This was quickly adopted in the Leeds and Huddersfield area – despite the protests and damage caused by ‘luddites’ objecting to the loss of work. Indeed by 1820 the mechanised brushing of woollen cloth using teazles had become a significant ‘finishing’ industry in Leeds, and the area began to dominate the UK production of fine woollen cloths, reaching a peak around 1850.
During this time a significant development that improved control of brushing, was the use of ‘spindle’ teazles, which had been drilled out and mounted on pins so that they rotated as they brushed. Although the use of teazles produced very satisfactory results, they wore and broke with use, and required regular replacement. The large number of teazles required by the industry can be judged by the fact that in 1840 one particular mill purchased 21 million heads. To meet the demand for these teazles, by 1850 in addition to supplies from the West Riding and South West England they were being imported from France, Spain and America.
Teazle case at Leeds Industrial Museum
You probably wonder why there wasn’t something more robust to brush the woollen cloth with. In fact, over the years there had been trials with machines that used metal teeth of some kind, but these were always found to be too robust, tending to rip the cloth if a fault or knot was encountered, when this would simply have broken the spike of a teazle. It wasn’t until 1880 that a machine using metal teeth was deemed to be successful, built by a company called Moser.
The use of machines using metal teeth and the declining demand for fine woollen cloths after 1850 steadily reduced the market for teazles, although there were short peaks in demand when military uniforms were needed during WW1 and 2. By the 1900s there were only some specialist manufacturers still using teazles, for the manufacture of materials such as cashmere, mohair, billiard cloth and tennis ball cloth. In 1970 a mill in Huddersfield still had an annual requirement for some 6 million heads.
So, visit The Angel whenever it’s possible, but you’ll be there a while if you’re waiting for ‘tazzle-men’.
By Rob Welborn, volunteer at Leeds Industrial Museum