Chapel Allerton
Chapel Allerton is an inner suburb of north-east Leeds, West Yorkshire, England, from the city centre.
It sits within the Chapel Allerton ward of Leeds City Council and had a population of 18,206 and 23,536 at the 2001 and 2011 census respectively. The area was also listed in the 2018 Sunday Times report on Best Places to Live in northern England.
Location
The region within the Chapel Allerton ward generally considered to be Chapel Allerton is bounded by Potternewton Lane to the south, Scott Hall Road to the west and Gledhow Valley Road to the north-east.Surrounding districts include Moortown, Meanwood, Roundhay, Gledhow, Chapeltown and Harehills. Chapel Allerton is on Harrogate Road, which, before the building of the A61 Scott Hall Road, was the main road from Leeds to Harrogate. The centre in terms of activity is Stainbeck Corner, at the junction of Stainbeck Lane, Harrogate Road and Town Street, which is also the key place on 19th century maps of the village.
Name
The name Chapel Allerton is first attested in the Domesday Book simply as Alreton and similarly spelled variants. It probably comes from Old English alor 'alder' and tūn 'estate, farm', thus meaning 'Alder farm'.The Chapel part of the name refers to a chapel associated with Kirkstall Abbey. This building was demolished in the eighteenth century; the site remains between Harrogate Road and Church Lane. Already in 1240 a charter referred to land "which lies between the road which goes to the Chapel of Allerton and the bounds of Stainbeck", but the name Chapel Alreton is first attested in the fourteenth century, coined to distinguish the place from the many other places called Allerton, such as the nearby Allerton Gledhow and Moor Allerton.
The name Chapel Allerton was reduced to Chapeltown, and from this time both names co-existed and were essentially interchangeable. Ralph Thoresby, writing in 1715, records Chapel-Town as a common name for the township of Chapel Allerton, describing it as "well situated in pure Air, upon a pleasant Ascent, which affords a Prospect of the Country ten or twelve miles". The open space to its east and north of Potter-Newton was "a delicate Green commonly call'd Chapel-Town Moor".
History
Before the Norman Conquest it was a township covering about five square miles, including what are now known as Alwoodley, Meanwood, Buslingthorpe, Scott Hall, Gledhow, Carr Manor, Moortown and Moor Allerton. This included a major and a minor Roman road, and a Roman altar was discovered in the foundations of the Sexton's cottage for the old Church of St Matthew when it was demolished in 1880.This area was substantially destroyed by William the Conqueror in what was known as the Harrying of the North, leaving only the remnants of a village with a church around the present-day centre. This is shown by the reduction in value from 40 to 2 shillings in the Domesday Book. The entry reads:
William awarded the area to the Lacy family, who later sold it to Simon de Alreton, who bestowed most of it to Kirkstall Abbey in 1152. The Abbey later sold much of it to the Mauleverer family of Potternewton. With the dissolution of the monasteries Kirkstall Abbey and its estates were taken over by the crown, and Queen Elizabeth I sold the Lordship of Chapel Allerton to Thomas Killingbeck.
In medieval times, the area was mostly small farms, with a village centred on a crossroads. In 1645 there was a plague in Leeds, particularly virulent around the town markets. Instead of travelling in to sell produce, the people from Chapel Allerton sold it at Chapeltown Green, at the north end of what is now Chapeltown Road. To pay, the buyer had to put money into a basin of vinegar, specially built into a wall.
Chapeltown Moor was an open area extending from Stainbeck Lane on the north down to Potternewton Lane on the south, bounded to the west by the stream known as Stain Beck and the turnpike road to Harrogate on the east. In the 17th and 18th centuries it had a racecourse and was also used for archery, cricket, foot racing, and cockfighting. It was finally enclosed between 1803 and 1813. In 1644 three men were hanged on a gallows there, roughly where the 1878 school is.
By the end of the 17th century, it had become a resort or second home for wealthy people from Leeds and in 1767 was described as the Montpellier of Yorkshire by one visitor. In 1834 Edward Parsons described it as "by far the most beautiful and respectable in the Parish of Leeds". An 1853 directory called Chapel Allerton "a neat and pleasant village" with the "beautiful hamlets" of Moor-Allerton, Meanwood and Gledhow and a population of 2497 within its chapelry, noting that "It has many handsome mansions and neat houses, mostly occupied by merchants &c. who have their places of business in Leeds. From 1839 there was a horse-drawn omnibus to Leeds, which was replaced by a horse tram in 1874, later by a steam tram and in 1901 an electric tram. The population rose from 1054 in 1801 to 4377 in 1898.
Allerton-Chapel was formerly a chapelry in the parish of Leeds, in 1866 Chapel Allerton became a separate civil parish, on 26 March 1904 the parish was abolished and merged with Leeds. In 1901 the parish had a population of 5841.
In 1900 it was still a village, isolated from Leeds and neighbouring Meanwood and Moortown by fields, which were gradually filled in with housing and new roads in the 20th century. First of all, rows of elegant stone-built houses along Chapeltown Road established a genteel suburbia, then in the thirties many large housing developments such as Carr Manor, Stainburn and Scott Hall meant that the isolated village was just another urban suburb.
Architecture
A large part of Chapel Allerton is a conservation area for the character and historical interest of its buildings, noted for a diversity of good quality domestic buildings from various periods.The historic core is around Stainbeck Corner, particularly around Town Street and Well Lane, with 8 Listed buildings. To the south and west of this is an area of grand detached houses with large gardens dating from the 18th and early 19th century. The earlier buildings are of fine-grained sandstone derived from the quarries which were once on Stainbeck Lane. These include a number of small 19th century two-storey houses as well as grander buildings. After 1890 brick terraced and back-to-back houses were built, but of better quality than workers' housing elsewhere in Leeds, as they were intended for artisans and the lower middle class. The advent of the electric tram in 1901 made the area more accessible and further housing began to fill in empty spaces though this was of varied types. It finally lost its village character in the 1920s and it joined the Leeds urban area. Thus the area between King George Avenue and Montreal Avenue was filled in between 1920 and 1939 with bungalows and stucco-faced houses typical of Leeds of the time. In Riviera Gardens, white rendered houses were built in the Modernistic style.
After the Second World War further building and rebuilding continued, mostly unremarkable, though with a few examples of good modern design. The area was once home to an art deco cinema, the Dominion. Opened in 1934 and lasting only until 1967 when it operated as a bingo hall until the later part of the 1990, the cinema stood on Montreal Avenue. The residential street 'Dominion Close' is close to its former site.
Houses
Allerton Hall was situated between Wensley Drive and Stainbeck Lane. In 1755 it was purchased by Josiah Oates, a merchant and an ancestor of Captain Laurence Edward Oates who perished in a blizzard at the age of 32 on the Terra Nova Expedition to the Antarctic led by Robert Falcon Scott in 1912. A brass plaque commemorates him in Leeds Parish Church. Most of the 60 bed mansion has since been demolished. The remaining parts of Allerton Hall is a grade II listed building. In the 1950s, the building was used by Twentieth Century Fox for the distribution of films across the North of England. Gledhow Mount Mansion is situated at the top of Roxholme Grove and is a Grade II Listed early 19th Century country house, with well preserved interior. It was built by architect John Clark for Leeds industrialist John Hives, who also built nearby Gledhow Grove Mansion.Clough House on Stainbeck Lane was converted to the Mustard Pot pub in 1979. It may date to 1653, and thus one of the oldest inhabited houses in Leeds, though most of the structure is from 1700 onwards. On Wood Lane are Gothic style villas in sandstone dating from the second half of the 19th century for the middle classes. Methley Place is an example of late 19th century terraces for the artisan class. The Hawthorns are a set of terraces built in the early 1900s in an unusual Manorial style.