University of Leeds

The city of Leeds lies at the northern edge of the English Midlands, the geographical region of the UK where the Industrial Revolution primarily took place. Leeds was especially important as a center of textile manufacturing, which led the way toward the explosive growth of British industry and empire during the Victorian era.

All of this helps explain why the University of Leeds traces its roots to the early nineteenth century, with the founding of the Leeds School of Medicine in 1831. In 1874, the medical school was absorbed into the newly founded Yorkshire College of Science, which in turn was expanded into a full liberal-arts school and renamed Yorkshire College in 1884.

Only three years later, in 1887, Yorkshire College became incorporated into Victoria University, a short-lived, regional, public university system based in neighboring Manchester that included campuses in Manchester, Leeds, and Liverpool.

However, rivalries between Manchester and Leeds proved to be too strong, and in 1904 the Leeds campus—the successor to Yorkshire College—went its own way, receiving its own separate royal charter as the University of Leeds.

Leeds can boast affiliation with three Nobel Prize laureates, namely:

• W.H. Bragg, for the development of X-ray crystallography — physics
• George Porter, for the development of flash photolysis — chemistry
• Nigerian playwright, Wole Soyinka — literature

Other Leeds-connected scientists include:

• Botanist and plant geneticist, David C. Baulcombe
• Immunologist, Percival Hartley
• Endocrinologist, James Francis Tait
• Cancer researcher and developer of tamoxifen, V. Craig Jordan
• Aviation pioneer, Robert Blackburn
• Astronaut, Piers Sellers

Other distinguished Leeds-affiliated individuals include:

• Poet, Geoffrey Hill
• Medievalist, philologist, and famed author of The Lord of the Rings, J.R.R. Tolkien
• Journalist and children’s author, Arthur Ransome
• Kenyan novelist, short-story writer, playwright, essayist, and memoirist, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o; the author and screenwriter, Jeremy Dyson
• Rock musician, Mark Knopfler
• Literary critic, G. Wilson Knight
• Journalist and radio broadcaster, Andrew Kershaw
• American radio host, Dennis Prager
• Actor, Chris Pine
• Art historian and philosopher, Herbert Read
• Sinologist, Owen Lattimore
• Marxist historian and author of The Making of the English Working Class, E.P. Thompson
• Sociologist, Zygmunt Baumann
• Eldest son of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII (after whom the Edwardian period is named)

University of Leeds's most influential alumni faculty include professors and professionals in the fields of Earth Sciences, Literature, and Biology. University of Leeds’s most academically influential people include Stephen Jay Gould, Wole Soyinka, and Ngugi wa Thiong’o.