Our Bicentenary

On 6 April the Philosophical Hall opened and served as a museum, lecture hall, meeting place, and office. It was even used to monitor and record Metrological Observations in Leeds which would be published in local journals. The Museum was initially open to members only and then in the 1840s it was opened to the public for a charge, which was dropped in the 1850s.

This report shows the types of objects that were first collected by the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. The initial collection focused heavily on natural science objects.

Sir John Savile Lumley was British Ambassador to Italy from 1883 to 1888. He led the excavations at Lanuvium and brought his discoveries back to England, where he split them between Leeds and the British Museum. Recently, volunteers have worked on a project to transcribe a notebook found after the 1941 bombing, listing objects from the Savile collection that were recovered.

Temple Newsam was acquired by Leeds City Council in 1922. Together with Leeds City Art Gallery, it formed an Arts Partnership. During the war, Sir Phillip Hendy (later the National Gallery Director) was Director of the art galleries and moved the art collections to Temple Newsam for protection.

During the Leeds Blitz of 1941, a bomb hit the Philosophical Hall and destroyed many of the objects. The museum worked to repair the building and restore its functions and collections. But in 1969, the damage to the museum had taken its toll and the decision was made to shut the Park Row building for the safety of its staff and the objects.

Lotherton Hall was gifted to the people of Leeds in 1968 by its owner, Sir Alvary Gascoigne.

Armley Mills was built and occupied by Benjamin Gott, a leading figure of the industrial revolution in the field of textiles. The mill was shut as a factory in 1969. The Curator of Leeds Museums at the time, Maynard Mitchell, realised the opportunity the mill could hold, initially as a storage area for the services’ industrial objects and eventually as a museum itself. He wrote to the City Engineer in 1970, and the museum was opened to the public in 1982.

Leeds City Museum reopens at the Mechanics Institute, where it stands on Millenium Square today.