Leeds

Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England, on the River Aire at the eastern edge of the Pennines. In 1888 the inventor Louis Le Prince filmed the Roundhay Garden Scene in the city, the oldest surviving motion picture.

Cistercian monks built Kirkstall Abbey beside the river in the 12th century, and its ruins still stand west of the center. In the Middle Ages the town became a market for the woolen cloth woven in the villages of the surrounding hills, and in the 18th and 19th centuries mills, canals and railways made it a center of the textile and engineering trades. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal, finished in the early 19th century, linked the city with the port of Liverpool across the Pennines. The architect Cuthbert Brodrick gave the city its Town Hall, with a tall clock tower, and the oval Corn Exchange in the Victorian period. Michael Marks opened a penny bazaar in Kirkgate Market in 1884, the start of Marks and Spencer.

Asda, the supermarket chain, has its head office in Leeds. Channel 4 moved its national headquarters to the city in the 2010s and makes programs in studios there.

Roundhay Park, in the north of the city, has lakes, woods and a large lawn used for concerts, and its Tropical World glasshouses keep butterflies, fish and meerkats. Headingley Stadium, in the north of the city, hosts Test cricket and rugby league, and Yorkshire County Cricket Club plays its home matches there. The Leeds Art Gallery holds British paintings and sculpture, with the Henry Moore Institute beside it.