Early Burley Contents

This booklet is not intended to be a full local history of Burley: that's why we chose the title we did. Instead, we hope to offer glimpses of what life has been like in the area, and why Burley has been and continues to be an important, interesting and lively place in which to live and work.

While the name 'Burley' was historically applied to a much wider area, we have confined ourselves to, approximately, the present-day parish of Burley: the area bounded by the River Aire, the railway line to Headingley and an imaginary line running roughly a quarter of a mile to the Leeds side of Kirkstall Lane.

The text is divided into four sections:

1. Origins Of Burley supplies a brief summary of the origins of Burley from the earliest times to around 1900.

2. A Walk Around Late Victorian Burley takes the form of a guided tour round the area, at the period when rapid growth gave Burley more-or-less the shape it has today, including the development of housing, churches, schools, trade and industry, transport and entertainment. Readers may find the sketch plan on pages 32-33 useful for following the walk.

3. LifeInBurleyBefore1945 (pages 34-58) uses the memories of those still living to recall old Burley Village and life in the terraced streets, together with memories of Kirkstall Road and its shops and mills in their heyday: ways of life that ended with the Second World War.

4. Burley Today (pages 59-60) briefly summarises changes since the war up to the time of writing 'Early Burley'(1992) and beyond.

There's also an Early Burley Index (pages 61-63) so that readers can explore entries that particularly interest them.

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