In 2015 we put together Stories From The Forests of Leeds, a collection of short stories set in a fictional Leeds forest. To follow up we wanted to look at some of the real heroes and great stories that made Leeds the city it is.
In today’s podcast Lawrence Cockrill and Bob Shaw discuss the lives of Robert Baker and Charles Jenkinson, and what makes a good city.
Early in the nineteenth century Robert Baker, surgeon to the Leeds Board of Health, battled prejudice and suspicion during the 1832 cholera epidemic to campaign for better sanitation among the cities slums.
The Reverend Charles Jenkinson was Vicar of Holbeck and Leader of Leeds City Council. Rev. Jenkinson oversaw the demolition of 14,000 slum housing and the building of 15,000 council houses.
You can read about Robert Baker and the 1832 Cholera epidemic here, find out more about Leeds body snatchers here and here, see Baker’s Sanitary map here, and read about the Broad Street cholera epidemic here.
You find out more about Charles Jenkinson here, and there’s a great collection of images from the Quarry Hill flats here.
Image Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images [email protected] http://wellcomeimages.org Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/