1808-1880
A splendid apartment
The tenancy in Kirkgate was continued until the end of June 1808 to allow for four ground floor shops to be finished and fitted out and the library to be moved in above. The rent from these shops has helped to sustain the library for the past two centuries. The library itself opened in Commercial Street on 1 July 1808. In his history of Leeds entitled, Loidis and Elmete (Leeds, 1816), Thomas Dunham Whitaker said, more generously, that it was a splendid apartment that would befit a college.
This image is an engraving of the Leeds Library by Thomas Taylor undertaken for T.D. Whitaker’s 1816 history of Leeds – Loidis and Elmete. The entrance was in the left-hand arch. The next arch contained the bookseller’s shop of the librarian, Mary Robinson. The building was opened on 4 July 1808.
There have been substantial additions to the Commercial Street building. Despite taking over the librarian’s house for book storage in 1818 and adding freestanding bookcases, space was soon short for the library’s expanding collection. R D Chantrell, the Leeds parish church architect, added galleries to the main room in 1821 (east) and 1836 (north and west). The library looked to build new premises in the 1850s near the new town hall but, fortunately, did not remove from the increasingly fashionable street where rental values sustain the library to this day. There was also a scheme to combine with the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society and to build a new, combined institution in Albion Place. This scheme also failed to materialise.
