Leeds travel guide

Top 10 sights in Leeds

Ranked by Wikipedia language editions — proven fame.

1. 

   1© Sirenuk · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Harewood House

   A Yorkshire country house built between 1759 and 1771 by John Carr, with interiors by Robert Adam, for Edwin Lascelles, whose fortune came from West Indian plantations and slavery. Capability Brown laid out the 1,000-acre landscape, and the Lascelles family lives there still.

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2. 

   2© Abcdef123456 at English Wikipedia · CC BY 3.0

   Sandal Castle

   A ruined castle at Sandal Magna above the River Calder near Wakefield, in origin a twelfth-century motte rebuilt in stone. The battle of Wakefield was fought below it in December 1460, and Richard Duke of York was killed there — the event Shakespeare dramatises.

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3. 

   3© Mike Kirby · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Wakefield Cathedral

   One of three co-equal cathedrals in the Diocese of Leeds, with Anglo-Saxon origins and a long history as the parish church of Wakefield. Its spire of seventy-five metres is the tallest in Yorkshire.

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4. 

   4© Mick Melvin · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Bradford Cathedral

   An Anglican cathedral in Bradford on a site where Christian worship has continued since the seventh century, a parish church until it was raised to cathedral in 1919. Its west window is by William Morris and Company.

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5. 

   5© Jungpionier · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Leeds Cathedral

   The Catholic cathedral of Leeds, dedicated to St Anne, rebuilt in 1904 in Arts and Crafts Gothic after the previous building was demolished for road widening. Leeds has no Anglican cathedral of its own; that diocese's three sit in Ripon, Wakefield and Bradford.

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6. 

   6© Michael Woodhead · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Bramley

   A district in west Leeds, part of the Bramley and Stanningley ward, which had 21,334 residents at the 2011 census. It grew with the nineteenth-century woollen mills and its back-to-back brick terraces still run up the hillsides.

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7. 

   7

   Pontefract Castle

   A ruined castle at Pontefract, once one of the strongest in the north, where Richard II is thought to have died in 1400 — probably starved. It was slighted after three Civil War sieges; the cellars and part of the multilobed keep survive.

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8. 

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   Kirkstall Abbey

   A Cistercian abbey founded about 1152 on the north bank of the Aire northwest of central Leeds, dissolved in 1539 and now standing in a public park. Turner, Girtin and Cotman all painted the ruin, which is unusually complete for a Yorkshire abbey.

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9. 

   9© Chemical Engineer · CC BY-SA 4.0

   National Science and Media Museum

   A national museum in Bradford, part of the Science Museum Group, covering photography, film, television, animation, video games and the internet across seven floors. It holds the first negative ever made, by Fox Talbot, and Europe's first IMAX screen.

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10. 

    10© Stephen Armstrong · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Al-Mahdi Mosque

    An Ahmadiyya mosque in Bradford built for £2.5 million raised entirely from voluntary donations by British Ahmadi Muslims. It holds about two thousand worshippers, among the largest in the city.

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1. 

   1© Sirenuk · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Temple Newsam

   A Tudor-Jacobean house in east Leeds with grounds landscaped by Capability Brown, and the birthplace in 1545 of Lord Darnley, husband of Mary Queen of Scots. The city bought it in 1922 and it holds a large collection of Chippendale furniture.

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   Roundhay Park

   A park of more than 280 hectares on the northeastern edge of Leeds, bought by the corporation in 1871, with woodland, two lakes and a ravine. About a million people a year use it and it has held concerts by the Rolling Stones and Bruce Springsteen.

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3. 

   3© philld · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Middleton Railway

   The oldest continuously working railway in the world, authorised by act of parliament in 1758 to carry coal from Middleton pits into Leeds. It ran the first commercially successful steam locomotives in 1812 and is now a volunteer heritage line.

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4. 

   4© Wehha · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Nostell Priory

   A Palladian house of 1733 at Nostell near Wakefield, built for the Winn family on the site of a medieval priory, with interiors by Robert Adam. It holds one of the largest collections of Chippendale furniture made for a single house, and an eighteenth-century dolls' house with original contents.

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5. 

   5© Tim Marchant · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Royal Armouries Leeds

   A national museum in Leeds holding the national collection of arms and armour, moved here from the Tower of London in 1996. Henry VIII's armours, Japanese and Indian arms and a hall of tournament equipment fill five themed galleries; entry is free.

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6. 

   6© Humphrey Bolton · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Bradford Grand Mosque

   The largest Sufi mosque by capacity in the United Kingdom, in Bradford, whose congregation began in 1983 and whose present building went up from 2002. It holds several thousand worshippers under a large central dome.

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7. 

   7© No machine-readable author provided. Jungpionier assumed (based on copyright cla · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Leeds Minster

   The minster and parish church of Leeds, dedicated to St Peter, on a site with a church recorded in the seventh century — the Leeds Cross, an Anglo-Saxon carving, was found in its walls. The present Gothic Revival building by Robert Chantrell was finished in 1841.

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8. 

   8© TJ Blackwell · CC BY-SA 3.0

   Harewood Castle

   A fourteenth-century stone hall house and courtyard fortress on the Harewood estate in West Yorkshire, Grade I listed. It stood roofless and overgrown for centuries and was consolidated in the 2000s; it can be seen from the estate paths.

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9. 

   9© Steve Partridge · CC BY-SA 2.0

   Leeds city centre

   The central business district of Leeds, bounded by the inner ring road and the River Aire, and divided into quarters — the arcades of the Victoria Quarter, the Corn Exchange of 1864 and the 1858 Town Hall are its set pieces.

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10. 

    10© DAVID M GOODWIN · CC BY-SA 2.0

    Hazlewood Castle

    A fortified country house in North Yorkshire between Aberford and Tadcaster, one of the oldest surviving in the county and now a hotel. It overlooks the field of Towton, where the bloodiest battle on English soil was fought in 1461, and its priest holes hid Catholic clergy under Henry VIII.

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