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Oakwood Church Leeds
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Quarrying was Oakwood’s principal industry during the 1800s and there were many quarries in the area
Most of the mansions, shops and houses built at Leeds and around Oakwood from the 1700s to the 1900s were made from locally quarried stone
At ‘Springwood’ on Oakwood Lane there remains an excellent example of “Harehills tooling” a distinctive local style of stone dressing
At the far back corner of the Co-operative supermarket car park you can see outcrops of rock which bear witness to quarrying
At the corner of Ravenscar Avenue, the building facing Roundhay Road houses on its ground floor, a hair, nails and beauty salon called S.C. Glamour. It was built in about 1900 by the brothers Lax who were largely responsible for the development of Harehills towards the end of the 1800s. They had a yard behind the Co-operative where Oakwood Surgery now stands
When the Lax brothers bought land for their Ravenscar development further up the slope, there were cottages across what is now Ravenscar Avenue which they demolished to provide road access. They built the S. C. Glamour property larger than the adjacent cottages and it is thought always to have been a shop of one sort or another
Heading up Ravenscar Avenue, the rendered terrace of workers
cottages on the right was built in about 1840 for quarry workers by the same person who built the original public house which stood opposite, perhaps with a customer base of thirsty workers in mind?
The wooded hillside behind the former Homebase DIY shop used to be Gipton Quarry, a major source of stone for Leeds buildings throughout the 1800s. This is private land where much visible evidence of quarrying still remains. Henry Lax Ltd a local property developer based at Roundhay still owns the quarried woodland between Ravenscar View and Tesco’s car park
More Local History
Oakwood Church Leeds
MP3 |
John Harrison “One of my early memories is of the quarry... ...although it had a fence between
the quarry and Fitzroy Drive, there was a path you could get on through woodland, and as a child
we used to play on this path with this great drop a few feet away. There were quarries down Gledhow Wood Road. I remember one of the
boys at school falling down and breaking his jaw in one.”
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