Origins Of Burley Six

The tranquillity of the area was, however, still relatively undisturbed, except by the festivities that occasionally took place on Oxford Meadow (later known as Cardigan Fields), the stretch of then open ground between Kirkstall Road and the river opposite the Cardigan Arms. The Leeds Flower show was held there, as were many other local and indeed national celebrations. In July 1861, for instance, the 23rd annual carnival of the Royal Agricultural Society attracted 200,000 people to the Meadow. Burley remained a haven between industrial Leeds and what a contemporary guidebook referred to as 'Kirkstall, which carries dinginess to the very precincts of the Abbey'.

(Sketch of Burley St Matthias Church)

The semi-rural placidity of the district was, however, about to be changed utterly. In 1872 the first horse-drawn trams rattled along Kirkstall Road to the Cardigan Arms in competition with the horse-drawn 'buses that had already been plying the route for nearly half a century: journeys every bit as eventful as a modern 'bus ride.

Green fields and inviting pastures stretch to the right and to the left, and mansions of no mean dimensions are here and there dotted over the hillside. The small picturesque village of Burley, with its quiet church and pleasant parsonage, stands in the immediate foreground: and the river, albeit not very clear, glides with refreshing coolness through the grounds.

from an account of Leeds Flower Show held on Cardigan Fields in 1870

In the next fifteen years the trams brought workers to a host of new mills and engineering factories along the river: Cardigan Mills, Milford Place Works, Burley New Mills, Burley Vale Mills and Burley Engine Works. The pressure for more housing in the area was unstoppable. From 1887 onwards the fields of the Cardigan & Brudenell families were sold off to property developers who built a network of back-to-back streets, many of which still stand today, their slopes and occasionally quirky arrangements a legacy of the field-pattern they replaced. This was the period in which the map of Burley was redrawn substantially as it remains today.

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