41 Hunslet Road, City and Hunslet, Leeds

Summary

Terraced house, built between about the 1870s and 1880s, architect unknown.

Description

Terraced house, built between about the 1870s and 1880s, architect unknown.

MATERIALS: red brick laid in irregular English bond (five rows of stretchers to one row of headers) with buff-coloured Millstone Grit ashlar dressings, and originally blue Welsh slate roof coverings (currently covered in corrugated iron).

PLAN: a two-storey terraced house with a basement. It is two-rooms deep with a one-room deep rear extension and is laid out to a through-plan; a corridor and staircase running along the north side of the building.

EXTERIOR: the west front is two-bays wide with an entrance doorcase on the left and a canted bay window on the right at ground-floor level, and then two segmental-headed windows at first-floor level. A brick and ashlar plinth runs across part of the terrace. The entrance is approached by stone steps and comprises a moulded stone surround with a keyed segmental arch. The adjacent bay window has a timber frame and stone cill but is missing the top and south side of the frame. All the openings are currently blocked with brick and concrete blocks but the windows originally contained four-pane plate-glass sashes. The first-floor windows have brick segmental-arched lintels with keystones and stone sills. There is a gabled roof running perpendicular to the street front with deep eaves supported by corbels above a moulded white brick eaves band and nailhead decorative course. A chimney stack is built into the north wall separating the adjacent terrace house.

The rear (east) elevation has a two-storey one-room deep extension with a monopitch roof projecting on the right. The openings are all under brick segmental-headed arches with stone sills. All of the windows are blocked but originally contained four-pane plate-glass sashes. There is a chimney stack rising above the north wall.

INTERIOR: the front door leads into a corridor with the main reception room off to the right. This room retains part of the original plaster cornice but the ceiling has otherwise collapsed and the chimney piece has been removed. The corridor continues to the location of the staircase (now missing), before widening under an archway and leading off to the right to a second reception room. This room has had several additional doorways inserted, probably during the early C20. The rear end of the corridor contained steps down to the basement (now missing) and a doorway into the rear kitchen. There are two external doorways from the kitchen to the rear yard. The basement contains two rooms; the front room has two timber casements within a canted bay window looking out into a lightwell in front of the property. An alcove appears to have stored coal through a hatch from the pavement above. On the first floor of the house is a main bedroom overlooking Hunslet Road, a second bedroom behind it and a third bedroom above the kitchen. The chimneypieces have been removed from these rooms and the ceiling has partly collapsed in the front bedroom but retains a cornice. An attic stairs located against the north wall of the landing has been removed but led to a fourth bedroom.

Note: the interior was not inspected and the description is based on internal photographs and a drone survey.

History

Hunslet is now an inner-city area of Leeds immediately south of Leeds City Railway Station, bounded on the north and east by the River Aire. It was a rural village until rapid growth during the C19 as a result of the Industrial Revolution. Hunslet became a major industrial and manufacturing centre, later dubbed the ‘workshop of Leeds’, including mills, foundries, railway and engineering works, a gasworks, chemical works, dye works and leather works, as well as workers' housing. It contributed to Leeds’s status as one of England’s most important commercial and industrial cities, becoming known as ‘the city that made everything’. Industrial expansion went hand-in-hand with an increase in the labour force and the construction of new workers’ housing, especially in the heartland of Leeds bordering the River Aire; the population of Hunslet expanded nearly twelve-fold over the course of the C19. In the 1840s and 1850s, there was a re-planning of the infrastructure in the area. A new river crossing (the second such crossing) was created linking Hunslet to the city at Crown Point Bridge. Two principal streets were laid out; Crown Point Road, extending south-west of the new bridge, and what would become Black Bull Street, extending south of the bridge, both linking to Hunslet Lane. The large triangle of largely open land between these streets passed between several owners before being speculatively divided into smaller plots with a network of subsidiary streets. One of these plots forms the area covered by the current terrace houses. It was advertised in the Leeds Intelligencer on the 21 January 1860 as having extensive frontages to Crown Point Road, Grey Street (now known as Hunslet Road), and an intended street that would become Sheaf Street. In 1862 the area was described in the Leeds Times as ‘one of the most improving parts of the town of Leeds’.

The subject site is shown as vacant, without any houses, on a map of Leeds drawn by B R Davies for the Weekly Dispatch Atlas published in 1863. (It should be noted that the area may have been surveyed some time before the publication date). A map of Leeds produced by W Brierley in 1866 depicts a set of buildings with a rectangular footprint on the corner of Crown Point Road and (what later became) Hunslet Road; the first of these terrace houses. By 1872 the block of houses is shown as broadly L-shaped in footprint, extending to the north-east. The veracity of depictions of individual buildings or houses on these two small-scale maps is uncertain. The first detailed plan of the area is the 1891 Ordnance Survey (OS) map, which depicts all the current dwellings, divided into five separate buildings, including ash pits and outdoor lavatories in the backyards. Addresses and numbering of these properties have varied over time, and multiple addresses have sometimes been given for single properties. The houses were re-numbered in 1901. The rear elevations of the properties gained additional duplicate addresses (as Nos 2 to 10 Sheaf Street) at a later date, which appears to have been either because they were sub-let with multiple occupants or on the assumption that several of the dwellings were back-to-back houses.

41 Hunslet Road is a single dwelling forming one of the five buildings shown on the 1891 OS map. The building has slightly different architectural detailing to the adjacent properties, and appears to have been added subsequent to them. The Stephen Levant Heritage Architecture report provides documentary information regarding the former occupants, summarised as follows. In 1906, Joseph Firth, mill furnisher and oil merchant, was living at the property. Later occupants included: George William Moore and his wife Mary who were working at the property in 1924; Herbert Paton in 1939; and the business of Joseph Firth in 1914 when it was used as offices and adjoined to a warehouse. It became derelict in about the 1990s and is currently - 2018 - unoccupied.

Reasons for Listing

41 Hunslet Road, built in about the 1870s or 1880s, in Hunslet, Leeds, is listed at Grade II for the following principal reasons:

Historic interest:
* as a surviving example of late C19 workers’ housing in Hunslet, a major industrial and manufacturing centre following the Industrial Revolution dubbed the ‘workshop of Leeds’;
* as a well-documented workers’ house with a list of known occupants, including a mill furnisher and oil merchant, as an example of the working population in this important area.

Architectural interest:
* for the external architectural features, such as the moulded ashlar door surround, keystones and ornamental eaves band, which contribute to the overall aesthetic treatment of the terrace.

Group value:
* with 16 and 18 Crown Point Road, and 37 and 41 Hunslet Road, which form the rest of this distinctive terrace, and illustrate the development of house plan forms in the mid to late C19.

External Links

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