A
Short History of Roundhay to the Twentieth Century.
Originally
Roundhay belonged to the de Lacy family, a gift to Ilbert de Lacy from William
the Conqueror after the invasion in 1066.
By medieval times the whole of Roundhay was a hunting park. Amazingly it was surrounded by about six miles of high fencing with a ditch twenty feet wide and ten feet deep, to keep the deer in, and unwanted intruders, out.
Through the
centuries, Roundhay had many owners, including royalty, who hunted in the park,
but as time passed, it was used less and less for this purpose and maintenance
of the park fence became a problem. Trees were cut down and sold for timber and
fuel. A process of gradual deforestation took place and more and more of the
park became fields worked by tenant farmers.
By the 19th
century, Roundhay was owned by the Duke of Norfolk, and on the death of the 9th
Duke, it passed to Lord Stourton from whom two Quaker businessmen, Thomas
Nicholson and Samuel Elam bought it in 1803. Not much later, Samuel ran into
financial difficulties and died, bankrupt, in 1811 while still a young man. The
same year, Thomas Nicholson purchased the manor of Roundhay.
Samuel’s
land and property in Roundhay were sold piecemeal to various buyers including
Samuel’s cousin Robert Elam, friends from the Goodman, and other families in
the local woollen merchant community. Thomas Nicholson also bought land from
Samuel Elam’s estate and these purchases enabled him fill in gaps in his own
Roundhay estate which was located mainly on the north side of today’s Wetherby Road. From then on, for the next sixty
years or so, the history of Roundhay and the Nicholson family was almost
synonymous.
Thomas
Nicholson died in 1821 less than 20 years after he acquired the main part of his
Roundhay Estate but in that time he spent money lavishly, developing the main
features of
Legend has it
that the Waterloo Lake (the lower and larger lake of the two) was built to
provide work for ex-soldiers back from the Napoleonic Wars and that Thomas lived
just long enough to see it filling up with water. Also at about the time of
Thomas’s death, local master builder, George Nettleton, was believed to have completed the Castle
folly in the Park, built mainly from cobbles quarried from deposits in the ground
nearby.
We are lead to believe that Thomas did not live long enough to complete all his dreams for his Roundhay Estate. It was left to his half brother, Stephen Nicholson, to build Roundhay St John’s church with money Thomas left to his widow, Elizabeth. This was consecrated in 1826.
In 1837 with
money from the same source, Stephen completed the building of six almshouses,
Thomas and
Stephen Nicholson were born in Chapel Allerton. In their adult years they went
to
Thomas and his
wife Elizabeth seem to have shared their time between
Both Nicholson
brothers married but they had no children and when Stephen died in 1858, the
Roundhay Estate and an estate in Chapel Allerton, which Thomas had bought in
1799, were willed to Stephen’s nephew, William Nicholson Nicholson, his
sister’s son who had earlier changed his surname from Phillips to Nicholson,
to conform with a condition of his inheritance.
William
Nicholson Nicholson had no problem in producing heirs to his fortune. He and his
wife Martha married in the newly built St John’s
church and in due course thirteen
children were born to them. With such a large family, when William died in 1868,
he had little option but to leave instructions in his will to sell off his
estates and to divide the proceeds between his wife and children.
The were
several problems though, for Barran and his friends. Roundhay was not part of
The next
problem was to get people to the park. At the time Roundhay was poorly served by
public transport. Also there was a lack of amenities such as poor sanitation and
no source of drinking water. John Barran took it upon himself to provide the
latter by building ‘Barran’s Fountain’ in 1882. It no longer dispenses
water but, recently restored, it now stands out as a magnificent granite
memorial to this courageous and resourceful man to whom the people of
As for
transport, some ambitious schemes (such as a railway on stilts!), were
considered and abandoned. Several years passed, until, in the 1890s, an electric
tramway system, apparently the first in
So far as
development of the area was considered, electricity for housing came to Roundhay
in the early 1900s. The Oakwood parade of shops was built about this time and
Roundhay came into its own as a desirable area for well-to-do residents. By 1912
when Roundhay was incorporated into the city of
The days of the hunting park, and the country squire-style estate of the Nicholsons, were over, a fading memory but still manifest today in surviving elements such as John Barran’s ‘People’s Park’, and the Nicholson legacy of Roundhay St John’s church, school and associated buildings on Wetherby Road.
Sadly, in recent years the church became increasingly difficult to maintain due to falling support and the ever-increasing modern problems of graveyard safety, theft and vandalism. Leading was stolen from the roof and so the inside of the church became exposed to the weather. St John's Church at Roundhay closed in November 2007.
Sources :
The reader can
find more information in the following :-
Steven
Burt’s book, An Illustrated History of
Roundhay Park, published by the author in 2000
N.R. Hurworth,
Thomas and Elizabeth Nicholson, The Quaker
Founders of
J.W. Morkill, The
Manor Of Roundhay, Thoresby Society (
J.
Peter
Oldfield’s Website for