Leeds

Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is governed by a metropolitan borough named after the city, the wider county having devolved powers. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. The city was a small manorial borough in the 13th century and a market town in the 16th century. It expanded by becoming a major production centre, including of carbonated water where it was invented in the 1760s, and trading centre (mainly with wool) for the 17th and 18th centuries. It was a major mill town during the Industrial Revolution. It was also known for its flax industry, iron foundries, engineering and printing, as well as shopping, with several surviving Victorian era arcades, such as Kirkgate Market. City status was awarded in 1893, and a populous urban centre formed in the following century which absorbed surrounding villages and overtook the population of nearby York. Leeds is about halfway between London and Edinburgh and has multiple motorway links; the M1, M62 and A1(M). The is, alongside Manchester Piccadilly, the busiest of its kind in Northern England. It is the county's largest settlement with a population of 536,280, while the larger City of Leeds district has a population of 812,000 (2021 census). The city is part of the fourth-largest built-up area by population in the United Kingdom, West Yorkshire Built-up Area, with a 2011 census population of 1.7 million. History of Leeds The name derives from the old Brittonic *Lātēnses (via Late Brittonic Lādēses), composed of the Celtic root *lāt- "violent, boiling" and the borrowed Latin plural derivational suffix -ēnses meaning "people of the fast-flowing river", in reference to the River Aire that flows through the city. This name originally referred to the forested area covering most of the Brythonic kingdom of Elmet, which existed during the 5th century into the early 7th century. Bede states in the fourteenth chapter of his Ecclesiastical History, in a discussion of an altar surviving from a church erected by Edwin of Northumbria, that it is located in .