He was contracted on civil engineering works including railways, harbour walls and bridge foundation construction.

He also known for his work on the breakwater at Portland harbour, the forts at Spithead, an extension to the Portsmouth Dockyards, and as the founder of the Hunslet Engine Company of Leeds.

He trained under his uncle George Leather, engineer of the Aire and Calder Navigation, and of the Goole docks.

Leather withdrew from the partnership in 1851 and shortly after opened his own colliery nearby, calling it Waterloo Main.

[6] In 1864 the Dale Dyke Dam, the construction of which he had been supervising, collapsed, causing the Great Sheffield Flood which killed over 200 people.

[7][8][9] In 1864 he established the Hunslet Engine Company, a locomotive manufacture, in Leeds on part of the site of the former Railway Foundry.