History of Seacroft

Seacroft (once a village, now a suburb of Leeds, England) pre-dates the Domesday book, with evidence of a settlement in the area from the Neolithic Age.

Seacroft remained largely unchanged for centuries as a small Yorkshire village, until in the 1950s the area was developed into Leeds' largest council estate.

[2] In 1643 a minor battle between Royalists for Charles I and a small group of Roundheads under Thomas Fairfax, who were en route from Tadcaster to Leeds, took place at Seacroft.

[3] In 1603 on 26 February, the dependent Manor of Seacroft was granted by King James I to Charles Blount, Earl of Devon.

[3] There is an old non-operating windmill, that pre-dates the estate, which has been incorporated into a hotel (now known as the Ramada Leeds North).

In the early 1950s, 500 Wates type houses - a prefabricated system construction - were built on the sub-divided north of the Lupton family's Beechwood Estate.

As such amenities were at a minimum in Swarcliffe and Whinmoor, with the estates only having parades of small local shops, public housing and primary schools.

Seacroft also has the main central bus interchange for North East Leeds, although the nearest railway station is in Cross Gates.

Whether Seacroft ever achieved being a 'satellite town within the city boundary' is debatable, the success of such a claim may be measured by the self-sufficiency of the area.

The area also offered very little in the way of employment, besides that provided by the shops and the few office blocks in the civic centre, there was only a small industrial estate, most of the major tenants (Cable and Wireless, Transco and many Leeds City Council facilities) have vacated the estate.

The northern parts of the estate were generally built first (with the exception of pockets of temporary prefabs), leaving undeveloped land between Seacroft and Gipton and Killingbeck to the South and West in the early years.

[14] The exact same style of building was used around Coal Road in Whinmoor and Queenswood Drive in Beckett Park.

Since the last of the prefabs (or gas houses) were finished in the early 1970s there was no further development of residencial properties in Seacroft until after the new century.

The Civic Centre had a Grandways supermarket and a Woolworths as well as many other smaller shops, banks, pubs, an open market (which was converted into a car park in the 1980s) and a library.

Talks were held with Leeds City Council, and Tesco were found as the preferred bidder to rebuild the Seacroft Civic Centre.

The car park was also enlarged and other shop units were built along the side of the supermarket, making the centre a crescent shape.

The huge supermarket as well as the other shops promised to create hundreds more jobs then would be lost through the loss of trade in the Civic Centre, this was no doubt one factor which made the redevelopment favourable with many Seacroft residents.

Until the building of the new centre, and since the closure of Grandways, it was said that Seacroft suffered from 'food poverty' as fresh produce could not be bought on the estate.

An illustrated history was prepared in 2018 in the form of a long wall chart, called the Seacroft Scroll, which has been displayed in libraries and schools.