David Olusoga at 5 Grosvenor Mount
The TV series A House Through Time returns to BBC Two at 9pm on 7 September 2021 - and this time it's set in Leeds. The house featured in the fourth series is 5 Grosvenor Mount, in a Victorian terrace on Headingley Hill (it was Listed Grade II in 1976). Its past residents include crusading lawyer William Bruce, a factory worker who became an industrialist's wife, morally corrupt mill owner Benjamin Wild, a pacifist couple who opposed the Boer War, a 1920s cruise ship worker, a British-Greek couple who met in war-torn 1940s Europe, and a Yorkshire Post theatre critic. Series presenter Dr David Olusoga studied as a postgraduate at Leeds Trinity University in 1996.
”Leeds has always been a city I'm fond of. Roundhay was a wonderful place to live and I have a lot of night-time memories of socialising in Headingley. We were running out of cities I had experience of, and it does help to have that familiarity."
"Textiles was the big trade of course, but there were multiple trades in Leeds and we looked at how much the city exploded out of the centre. We underestimate just how small cities were before the 19th century. I was inspired by Turner's 1816 painting of Beeston Hill looking at Leeds in the distance - nowadays we would think of Beeston as being very central.
"Headingley was co-opted into Leeds - it used to be farmland. The story of these settlements being swallowed up is a great one, and Headingley is also quintessentially Leeds. It's the most modern house so far by about 20 years, and when I first saw a photo of it, with the sandstone blackened by soot from industry, my memories of Headingley immediately came back."
"People like William Bruce changed Britain from this harsh Georgian society to a more socially concerned one. He gave a lot of time and energy, and he was also caught up in a murder case that was probably the biggest scandal of Victorian Leeds.
"Then we have the mill owner Benjamin Wild, who was the other half of the Victorians' story. He achieved things by being ruthless, and he was almost like a pantomime villain who put profit above all else. But people like him were not expected to care, and their vast wealth made Britain. We need to celebrate the reformers by also recognising the ruthless. When a worker was killed in an accident in his factory, there were no consequences, no investigation or inquiry despite a family being torn apart."
Dr David Olusoga, with owners Jackie and Pete
When a crack above the front door was pointed out by the present owners, the film crew investigated. "They'd been told it was caused by an earthquake, and at first I was disbelieving, but we looked into it and found it appeared in the Dogger Bank earthquake in 1931, which measured 6.1 on the Richter scale and was one of the biggest to ever hit Britain. Often during research these sort of folk tales come up. Often we end up dismissing urban myths but this one turned out to be exactly right."
"We are telling the history of one house, but it's also the portrait of a city, and we try and make our cities look beautiful and show them at their best. As a country we underserve our cities outside London - but they have global stories too, and A House Through Time is a remedy for that. We celebrate our working-class ancestors, such as my own who worked in factories and in service."
Extracted from Grace Newton, ‘Why one Headingley house is a real home to history’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 31 August 2021, page 6.
The house is currently (April 2022) on the market, see Sharon Dale, ‘This Victorian home for sale in Headingley’, Yorkshire Post, 16 April 2022.
See also, Grace Newton, ‘TV programme takes home owners back through time’, Yorkshire Evening Post, 7 September 2021, page 9.
