Monuments of Leeds

In the summer of 2020, the toppling of slave trader Edward Colston’s statue in Bristol during a Black Lives Matter protest prompted Leeds City Council to commission a review of statues and other monuments and sculptures in Leeds. The aim was in part to discover if Leeds had any contentious statues of its own and to ensure that these monuments, if not removed, were at least properly contextualised. A further aim was to make recommendations around the city’s future policy on commemorating public individuals, to ensure that this reflected the diversity and values of modern Leeds. Alderwoman Alison Lowe, now Deputy Mayor of West Yorkshire for Policing and Crime, was appointed to write the report. She was supported by a panel of experts, including Leeds Beckett University lecturers Emily Zobel Marshall and Simon Morgan.

The report concluded that there were no ‘Edward Colstons’ in Leeds and there was no real demand for any statues to be removed. However, a public consultation undertaken as part of the review revealed a general lack of knowledge about who was and was not commemorated in the city. One of Alison Lowe’s recommendations was therefore that students from Leeds Beckett’s University’s flagship Public History Project module be commissioned to create a resource detailing different commemorative sites in the city, to be made available to the public through the internet.

In the autumn of 2021, fifteen final-year students began work on the project with the backing of Leeds City Council and the support of Leeds Civic Trust. It was decided to focus on statues, murals and other monuments representing or dedicated to named individuals. Blue plaques were omitted, as the Civic Trust have their own database of these. The students’ first task was to decide what information should be recorded about each site, allowing us to create a recording form to ensure that each entry included a standard set of information about the monument/mural, its creator and its subject. Students recorded, where possible, the reasons why monuments were erected, and whether the reputation of their subjects has changed over time, including any controversies that now attach to them and which are consequently part of their public meaning.

The results of the students’ labours are contained in this website, which we hope will become an important public resource for the people of Leeds and visitors to the city. As well as the map and entries for individual monuments, there are two short essays written by the students. One explores the turn away from statues towards murals as a means of celebrating Leeds’s cultural icons; the other addresses the way in which some statues can and have become the focus of public debate.

Finally, it should be noted that the list of monuments on the site is not yet comprehensive. Several murals relating to Leeds United and one of industrialist John Marshall do not yet have entries, while an entry will also need to be added for the forthcoming memorial to David Oluwale. Members of the public who know of monuments or murals that are not currently listed are encouraged to use the online form to make us aware of them.