Top 7 Leeds Businesses That Started Much Smaller Than You Think

Before Waddingtons became synonymous with Monopoly and Cluedo, it was a theatrical printing business. John Waddington, a Leeds theatre manager, joined forces with actor and playwright Wilson Barrett in the late nineteenth century. They began by printing playbills, programmes and other promotional material for the theatre world, including work for Leeds Grand Theatre. The company moved into games production in 1922, then secured the British licence for Monopoly in 1935. Cluedo followed after the Second World War. It is a lovely piece of Leeds business history: a firm that began producing the printed ephemera of live entertainment ended up making games played in millions of homes.

Freeserve helped bring the internet into British homes, but its story began with a fairly ordinary frustration. Ajaz Ahmed, then a PC World store manager in Leeds, realised that customers were buying computers without having an easy way to get online. He persuaded people at Dixons to explore the idea, and local internet company Planet Online helped devise the crucial business model: offer access for free and earn revenue from the telephone calls used to connect. Freeserve launched in 1998 and rapidly became one of Britain’s biggest internet service providers. Its corporate headquarters eventually sat elsewhere, but a substantial team of designers, engineers and developers worked from a converted warehouse by Leeds docks. For a moment, the city was at the centre of the British internet boom.

Joshua Tetley founded his Leeds brewery in 1822, after buying an existing brewery site for £400. Brewing for sale was not yet the straightforward business it would become: many pubs and private houses made their own beer, and the market was uncertain. Tetley’s bet was that quality and consistency could win customers. His son Francis joined him as a partner in 1839, and the business grew into one of the North of England’s largest breweries. By the twentieth century, the name was known far beyond Yorkshire, and the company became a major force in British brewing. The surviving Art Deco headquarters on Hunslet Road is a reminder of the industrial empire that grew from that original purchase.

Burton is the exception in this Leeds line-up: Montague Burton opened his first tailoring business in Chesterfield in 1903, not Leeds. But the city became central to the extraordinary scale of the enterprise. In 1921, Burton acquired land on Hudson Road and built a clothing factory that eventually employed more than 10,500 people. It was one of the largest clothing factories in the world, with an astonishing range of facilities for its workforce, including medical and dental services and a sun room. Burton’s story is therefore not a Leeds-born business, but it is a remarkable example of how a modest tailoring operation grew into an industrial giant with Leeds at its heart.

The Hunslet Engine Company was founded in 1864 at Jack Lane in Hunslet by civil engineering contractor John Towlerton Leather. Its early output was modest: in its first years the works averaged fewer than ten locomotives annually. These were practical industrial engines, built for contractors, collieries and short-haul work rather than glamorous passenger services. The business steadily developed its reputation, and by 1902 its locomotives were being supplied to more than thirty countries. Hunslet later became particularly associated with shunting engines and the famous Austerity locomotives produced during the Second World War. It is a reminder that Leeds engineering did not just serve the city’s factories and railways; it travelled around the world.

Job Day & Sons began in Leeds in 1901 after its founder invented a machine for packing soap. That sounds like a small and specialised beginning, but the firm became an inventive engineering business with a much wider range. Among its developments were an automatic bacon slicer, machinery for making bags and packaging goods, and the wonderfully named Day-Leeds Light Cars, an attempt to build a vehicle suited to busy Edwardian streets. The company eventually concentrated on packaging machinery at its Beeston Royds works, producing equipment that was sold overseas, including to Japan. It was later absorbed into larger engineering businesses and its name gradually disappeared. Leeds Libraries has recovered a fascinating story of a company that deserves to be better remembered.