INTRODUCTION
Today Chapeltown is most famous for its Afro-Caribbean population and for being a run-down inner-city area with high levels of poverty and social problems. But originally this suburb of Leeds was built as a residential area for the middle classes seeking to escape from the industrial pollution in the city centre and from proximity to the working class.
In 1929 Gordon Stowell published his novel, The History of Button Hill. It was a fictional account of the history of Chapeltown, or 'New Leeds' as it was originally called. Stowell points to the shortage of middle class housing as the reason behind the building of Button Hill which he then describes:
"The prime reason was not the housing of the working class population….For them only too many houses have been provided, street after street of squalid little back-to-back dwellings,with no gardens or yards and little sanitation. The people who were hardest hit were the really nice people, the people with nice ideas and aspirations, who, though not extravaganly rich, had still made a little money for themselves and could afford to send their children to the Grammar school or to the new Modern School. To such as these the new suburb on Button Hill was a godsend.
Builders were turned loose on the estate. It was split into gaping rectangles. Water, gas, and drains were laid. And presently a dozen rows of desirable villa-residences shot up as if by magic, and all the contours of the hill were permanently changed. The old turnpike was cleared away, and the Fleece Tramways Company, extending its track, put on a new service of horse-trams out to the Bentham Arms. Removal vans became a familair sight up Bathwater Road as the best people in Fleece moved themselves and their furniture to a more worthy setting.
Lord Bentham in his wisdom had decreed that the builders were to restrict themselves to villas of a superior type. Retail shops and licensed premises were barred. From the outset the new suburb could not help but feel itself exclusive and superior. Its modestly imposing homes were manifestly designed with some pretensions to that subtle quality known as "class."
To call it a garden city suburb would have be an anachronism, but it was the nearest thing to a garden city suburb that the imagination of man had conceived up to that date. It was spacious and leafy. Native trees had been spared whereever possible, and every house possessed its green cutilage, a lawn, and a curly footpath of concrete or imported gravel, to give the illusion of landed proprietorship on a small scale. Moreover, the genuine untouched country was still so near that on summer mornings, as you stood at the bedroom window inserting your tiepin, you could sniff the dew-flavoured hedges and the turned hay, and find it difficult to believe that you were yet within half an hour's tram-ride of the office......"
This process of the better off moving out of the city centres took place all over Britain fom about 1830 onwards. It ususally followed a similar pattern, new suburbs being established on the same side of any river as the town was originally, and up the surrounding slopes.
In Leeds this expansion took place first in Headingley, Woodhouse Moor forming a substantial breathing space from the encroachments of the centre. The first houses were built for mill-ownwers or prosperous merchants. And these would be detatched mansions or villas, within large grounds. However, later the lower middle classes were catered for with terraces containing nonetheless commodious and well-built houses. Horse-drawn buses or trams provided transport to the city.
The creation of New Leeds was more problematic. Plans were drawn up as early as 1825 but the main part of it was not to be completed till 1890.
We shall illustrate the history of Chapeltown by following the story of a single house: Enmoor Lodge, or 96 Chapeltown Road, and now known as number 1 Leopold Street. The history of this house and of Chapeltown itself is interconnected with that of Leeds in terms of its changing landscape, social structure, industry, commerce, education, and its immigrant communities.