Galleries at Leeds Industrial Museum

Discover how Leeds helped to launch high street fashion through pioneers including John Barran, Joseph Hepworth and Montague Burton. For over a century, Leeds dominated the production of men’s suits in Britain, bringing unparalleled prosperity and employment to the city.

The tailoring gallery explores the vital role these tailors played in clothing the nation. At the industry's peak, the Leeds-based manufacturer Burton’s clothed approximately one in every five British men for work, war, and leisure.

Step into our recreated 1950s Burton’s shop to experience life as a customer. Choose your fabric, select your style, and imagine the bustle of a shop where hundreds of measurements were taken daily to ensure the perfect fit.

Visit the Sewing Gallery to see a recreated small-scale factory to see the specialist equipment and advanced textile machinery—much of it designed by Leeds’ own engineering firms—that powered the height of the industry.

Explore our textile gallery as it displays the vital processes of woollen cloth production for which Leeds became famous, preserving both the machines and the atmosphere of a local mill at the turn of the century. Our collection of historic machinery tells the story of the thousands of people who worked here during the height of the textile boom.

A vast area of the textile gallery is taken up by two enormous woollen spinning mules, that are an impressive throwback to Leeds’s industrial past. The pair of spectacular machines were both manufactured by Platt Brothers and Co in Oldham and date from 1871 and 1904, when they were used to spin textile fibres into yarn. The older of the two is thought to be the oldest of its kind anywhere in the world while the 1904 model is still fully operational and is regularly demonstrated in the museum.

Through a generous donation of the family’s personal archive by Liz Tempest, visitors can now explore the Tempest room at the museum. This display of photographs, site plans, and business records offers a rare glimpse into the mill's final chapter.

Celebrating the creative industries of Leeds, the Media in the Mill gallery showcases historic cameras, projectors, and printing equipment alongside a recreated 1920s cinema. Here, you can explore Leeds’ cinematic legacy—dating back to 1888 and the inventor Louis Le Prince, who used his pioneering camera to capture the world’s first moving images. Find out more about Louis Le Prince.

Discover our collection of Kershaw & Sons projectors, equipment so renowned for its quality that it accompanied Captain Scott on his expeditions to Antarctica. You can also trace the evolution of the printing trade, from the city’s early workshops to its 1911 peak, when 8,000 people were employed in the industry. Watch live demonstrations of traditional printing techniques and learn about the local jobbing printers, like William Witt of Bramley, alongside big firms with international reach like John Waddington—the firm famous for producing Monopoly.