Which still Leeds derives it name from the old Brythonic word Ladenses that stands for "people of the fast-flowing river". The river being mentioned here is the River Aire which still flows through Leeds. Originally Leeds referred to a forested area in the 5th to the 7th centuries. The citizens of this city are known as Loiners. They are sometimes also reffered to as Leodensians which is derieved from the city’s Latin name. In Welsh, it is said to be derieved from the word Ilod which means “a place”. Leeds has a population of 2.3 million.
As of today, Leeds economy is the most varied of all the UK's main employment centres. Jobs in Leeds have grown at a faster pace than elsewhere specially in the private-sector. Leeds stands third on the podium when it comes to jobs area. It had 480,000 in employment and self-employment at the start of 2015. Leeds is also ranked as a gamma world city by the Globalization and World Cities Research Network. It is also known as a hub of culture, finance, and commerce in the West Yorkshire Urban Area. There are four universities in Leeds – The University of Leeds, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds Trinity University and the University of Law. In the United Kingdom, the total number of students in Leeds stands at the fourth place.
Cinema in Leeds
First of all it was in the October of 1888 that Louis Le Prince using his single lens camera shot moving picture sequences known as the Roundhay Garden Scene and a Leeds Bridge street scene. These were developed on Eastman’s paper film. The film festival held at Leeds nowdays and called Leeds International Film Festivals International has a Short Film Competition that is named after Louis Le Prince. The second person to do so was Wordsworth Donisthorpe who like Prince had a strong connection to the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. Donisthorpe applied for a patent for his camera that could capture moving images twelve years earlier to Prince's.
Leeds has been known to host the rich film exhibitions now and then. Besides hosting the Leeds International Film Festival and Leeds Young Film Festival, it plays host to many independent cinemas and pop-up venues for screening films. The two movie houses - Cottage Road Cinema and Hyde Park Picture House – have since the early 20th century been showing and are ranked among the oldest cinemas to do so in the whole of UK.
Culture
Leeds has been home to many artists such as Kenneth Armitage, John Atkinson Grimshaw, Jacob Kramer, Barbara Hepworth, Henry Moore and Edward Wadsworth, who belonged to diverse fields. The history of art exhibitions in Leeds goes far beyond the 1888 when the first art gallery opened in Leeds. A series of exhibitions termed as 'Polytechnic Exhibitions' were regularly held from 1839. Established in 1903 and lasting upto 1923 the Leeds Arts Club founded by Alfred Orage had members which included Jacob Kramer, Herbert Read, Frank Rutter and Michael Sadler. This club advocated the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, and German Expressionist ideas about art and culture. Noted sculptors Barbara Hepworth and Henry Moore started their carrersr in the 1920’s at the Leeds College of Art.
The club acted as a centre for essential art education in the middle of the 20th century guided by artists such as Harry Thubron and Tom Hudson, and the art historian Norbert Lynton. In the 1970s the Leeds College of Art split from the college to form the center of the new multidisciplinary Leeds Polytechnic which later came to be known as Leeds Beckett University. The University of Leeds served as the alma mater of Herbert Read, one of the leading international theorists of modern art. It was also the place where Marxist art historian Arnold Hauser taught from 1951 to 1985. Leeds acted as a centre for radical feminist art, with the Pavilion Gallery, which opened in 1983, showing the work of women. The University of Leeds School of Fine Art was another center dedicated to the development of feminist art history in the late 1980’s and 90’s.
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