Leeds’ development as a town during the lifetime of Mary Randall Vickers

In Mary Randall Vickers’ lifetime, Leeds underwent vast changes and emerged as one of the most important manufacturing towns in the country.   

Three decades before her birth, Daniel Defoe had already described Leeds as a “large, wealthy and prosperous Town… The Cloth Market […] is indeed a Prodigy of its Kind and is not to be equalled in the World…. [Briggate] is a large, fair and well built street” which “was lined with a variety of dwellings; fine mansions often adjoining more humble timer framed buildings.” 

Leeds’ population, growing fast from about 6,000 in 1700, is estimated to have been 16,380 people in 1771 (a couple of years after Mary started work) and 25,000 by 1790.  Thirty years later, at the 1821 census, it had grown to around 137,000, and by the 1831 census (five years after Mary’s death) it is recorded at about 184,000.  So Leeds was sucking in people throughout Mary’s lifetime, and its population soared.

Plan of the Town of Leeds with the recent improvements, surveyed in 1821 by Charles Fowler, Leeds

The consequent demand for housing helps to explain the success of building societies such as the Boggart Close Greater Building Society (St Peter’s Sq.) in which Mary’s father invested so heavily. 

Photograph of Houses in St. Peter's Square, 1908

Leeds’ growth had been driven for decades by the success of the wool merchants. Leeds had become the principal market for woollen broad cloths (both dyed and undyed) manufactured across the West Riding.  It also became an entrepot for fancy cloths and worsteds. By the 1770s, Leeds merchants handled approximately one-third of all woollen cloth exported from England.  This was a vital service to the nation since woollen cloth accounted for over half England’s home-produced exports.  In other words, Leeds merchants were generating about one sixth of Britain’s exports – an extraordinary statistic.  (The development of Leeds’ “West End” – the Park estate, commenced in 1767, was presumably based in good measure on the on the profits of this trade). 

If the growth in trade was driven by the cloth merchants, it was enabled by infrastructure.  Transport links were crucial.   Parliament was lobbied to pass Acts enabling turnpike roads (ie better quality roads, but tolls to be paid) to be built on routes which are still used today. Daily coach services to London and many other cities were operating from the 1780s. But the most important investment had already happened in 1700 – the opening of the Aire & Calder Navigation, which enabled larger vessels to sail directly, via Goole, between Hull and Leeds & Wakefield.  Seventy years later, Parliament approved the construction of the Leeds & Liverpool canal, at last completed in 1816.   

Leeds’ growth was (literally) fueled by coal – by 1779 the Middleton Colliery was supplying at least 48,000 tonnes of coal per year (which were transported into Leeds by what is now the world’s oldest continuously operating railway – the Middleton Colliery railway, established in 1758.  Originally a horse-drawn railway, it was converted to steam in 1812 using Matthew Murray’s steam powered locomotives). 

But from the 1780s & 1790s two concurrent and additional factors came into play.  One was mechanization, including the use of steam power; the other was “assemblage”, ie the bringing together of all or most of the many processes of woollen cloth production under one roof. The engineer Matthew Murray (1765-1826) the flax spinner John Marshall (1765-1845) and the woollen cloth manufacturer Benjamin Gott (1762-1841) are the best-known exponents in Leeds of these transformational developments at that time (more about them below). Mary was an exact contemporary of theirs. Indeed, later, Mary’s life featured co-investment in a “machinery maker”, including the purchase of a steam engine in 1811 – a sign of her willingness to stay up with the times. 

Ryley’s 1806 “The Leeds Guide” records the drastic increase in production of “woollen cloths, milled at the Several Fulling mills in the West Riding of Yorkshire between March 1788 and March 1805”. The fact that the number of Broad Cloths more than doubled from 139,406 to 298,178 in those seventeen years shows the impact of the transformational developments above.   

Randall and Vickers’ newspaper advertisement in 1802, “inform[ing] the Manufacturers and Millers of Woollen Cloth that they have contracted for several Fuller’s Earth Pits, the Earth of which will be found to be much superior to any hitherto found in this country” indicates that the increasing demand for Fuller’s Earth, used in woollen cloth finishing, created space for new suppliers to establish themselves. 

Ryley concluded that “The many advantages which this town [Leeds] possesses with respect to the convenience of Water Carriage, and the cheapness of Coals, combined with the large capital of many of its Merchants and Manufacturers, will, in all probability, long insure it a pre-eminent rank among the manufacturing and commercial towns in this kingdom”. 

Matthew Murray

Concurrently in the early 1790s, the first (in Leeds) steam-powered cotton spinning factories, woollen cloth factories (of which Gott’s Bean Ing mill was by far the largest), and the first part of Marshall’s flax spinning works, were all being built.  

Multiple factors enabled this: increased demand for their products, technological innovations and process improvements, money to invest (on the back of the prosperous woollen cloth trade), factory sites readily available by the river, and a desire to reduce the dependence on “out-work” in the textile industry whereby individual spinners, weavers and finishers would practice their arts from their own homes (which were often some distance from Leeds) so requiring multiple transports between the different stages of processing which were both costly and delaying. 

Gott was a wool merchant and an organizer. His “manufactory” was designed to supply his merchanting firm, bringing together on one site all the processes to convert raw wool into finished cloth. Many of these processes were not mechanized; although in 1800 Bean Ing mills employed about 1,000 workers, three quarters were employed on hand processes.  

Marshall, like Gott, inherited a merchanting business.  His own fascination was to prepare and spin flax by machine.  This was satisfactorily achieved once he employed Murray, whence forth they registered a patent and Marshall started construction of what would become a vast manufacturing estate in Holbeck. 

Murray’s first job in Leeds had been at John Marshall’s mill in Adel as a textile engineer.  Later incorporating his business with two partners, Fenton, Murray and Wood – based at the Round Foundry in Holbeck – was classed in 1805 as “the best manufacturers of steam engines in England”, surpassing those of their Birmingham rivals, Boulton and Watt, as well as supplying flax processing machinery. 

As Gillian Cookson concluded in the book ‘The Age of Machinery – Engineering the industrial revolution, 1770-1850’, “The new textile ventures made work for machine-makers, and drew engineers towards these centres, with very real prospects for success.” 

Leeds was a prosperous, fast growing, crowded town, still centred on its cloth merchanting business but rapidly expanding with new industries.  It was an exciting place in which to live and work during Mary’s lifetime. 

© Peter Vickers, 2026

Peter Vickers studied History at Oxford University before joining the family business, “Vickers Oils” where he spent his entire working career. Having retired from the operating business in 2025, he is researching and writing the stories of the family and business ahead of its bicentenary in 2028.