Leeds City Council talks culture
Holbeck, Leeds
Chief Officer for Culture and Sport, Leeds City Council, Cluny Macpherson will be speaking about Leeds current and future ambitions to raise the city's profile as a cultural destination for locals, businesses and tourists:
'Leeds City region has an incredibly rich fabric of textile production and design and this is still reflected in the city architecture. Our recent bid for the European Capital of Culture 2023 drew widely on this and interpreted it in a contemporary way, reflecting the city's current population and digital technology' he says.
Cluny states that Leeds has a much higher ratio of local people visiting museums and theatres than some of its rival cities which are very dependent on tourist income.
Much of the textile tradition in the city dates back to the Cistercian Monks setting up at Kirkstall Abbey in 1152. It was during the 17th and 18th centuries that the city expanded in the woollen cloth trade.
The developer, CEG spoke at our March forum about its Kirkstall Forge development on the outskirts of the city - an area of 57 acres on the oldest continually active industrial site in the UK, which is now a high quality mixed use development of a thousand new homes with office space, leisure and retail plus a new railway station.
While construction is active in the city to provide more homes at Leeds Dock through the developer Allied London, Leeds continues to host cultural activities such as the 'Light Night' - an annual festival of spectacular light projections, film, dance, music and theatre which takes over the city centre. Additionally, Leeds puts on 'Thought Bubble' which is the UK's largest annual event celebrating sequential art - everything from super heroes to independent press comics.