LX - LXI - East End, West End: The Face of LEEDS During Urbanisation 1684 - 1842
Maurice Beresford
"Yet at the very time of Donald's survey a deliberately planned West End extension of the town was beginning and from 1786 an East End began to be created, albeit in a fit of absence of mind. By the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815 The West End had been lost to industry and smoke, and a second West End was visible in the fields of Little Woodhouse, soon to be ceded, however, as the town's better-off inhabitants made a knight's move to the new suburbs of the northern townships; meanwhile in the fields over which they had jumped, working-class housing was extended as terraces, a form that had once been confined to the exclusive Georgian West End.
Part One of this book examines the environment of an undifferentiated and compact town, using as starting point the two Prospects of Leeds published in Ralph Thoresbys history of 1715 and the map produced by John Cossins in 1725. Part Two is concerned with the novelty of a residential West End and Part Three with the origins of workingclass housing in an East End that was eventually to be perceived as the extreme embodiment of environmental deterioration. The slowness of that perception lay partly in the economic and social sentiments which prevailed in a country where industrialisation was on a novel scale and where even radical and reforming opinions had other priorities than a solution to a mere Sanitary Question."
From page XX