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LEEDS 407

advantageous. It is distant from London by the Great Northern Railway 185 miles, from Edinburgh 225, from Liverpool 74, from Manchester 42½, and from Birmingham 113, and may be said to occupy a central position in the railway system of England. It has also communication with Liverpool by the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, and with Hull by the Aire and Calder navigation, and through these means of transit has the highest facility for the transmission to the principal seaports of England of its various manufactures, and for receiving raw material at the lowest rate of charge. It is, moreover, the centre of an extensive coal and iron district. All the advantages for the successful working of machinery are therefore within its reach, and hence it has become the seat of several important industries, especially the woollen and linen manufactures, iron working, and machine-making.

Though regarded as the capital of the great manufacturing district of the West Riding, Leeds is not in its centre, but on its border. Eastward and northward the country is wholly agricultural, while to the west and south-west the populous villages resound with the shuttle and the steam-engine. In this district are carried on a woollen manufacture of great extent and of considerable antiquity and a worsted manufacture of extraordinary vigour (a graft on the woollen manufacture); to these have latterly been added the iron manufacture and that of machines and steam-engines, and the making of boots and ready-made clothing, besides a manufacture of flax, which now constitutes one of the staple trades of Leeds.

Plan of Leeds.

Cloth is the staple trade of the town, although the manufacture itself is not the leading one within the borough, being carried on, to a large extent, in townships out of the parish and borough of Leeds. In the town, however, the trade centres, and there the cloth is finally prepared for the market by what is technically termed finishing or dressing – a department quite distinct in Leeds from that of the manufacturer. In this respect the Yorkshire cloth trade differs essentially from that of the west of England, where the manufacturer conducts the two operations of making and finishing the cloth within the same premises. Several Leeds firms conduct their business on the west of England model; but, as the rule, the order of the trade is as follows. The great bulk of the cloths sold in Leeds are produced either in the out-townships of the borough, or in the villages lying west of Leeds, and principally in Pudsey, Farsley, Rawden, Yeadon, Horsforth, and Guiseley, which are all in other parishes, within an extreme radius of 10 miles from Leeds. The cloths so manufactured are sold in the unfinished or balk state to the merchants of Leeds, by whom they are put out to the cloth-dressers or finishers, whose special craft it is to raise the pile or nap on the face of the cloth, and to complete it for the purposes of the tailor and the final consumer. In former times a considerable proportion of the business between the manufacturer and the merchant was conducted in the cloth halls, which are two in number. In these the manufacturers formerly took their stand and waited the custom of the merchants, but within the last twenty or thirty years a great change has taken place in the mode of transacting business, and the cloth halls have practically fallen into disuse. The merchant now orders his goods direct from the manufacturer, specifying the weight, colour, and quality