Why am I passionate about this?

I was born and raised in Leeds and moved back here in 2013. My ancestors first came here a couple of hundred years ago. The place is my passion, but itā€™s also in my DNA. I write historical crime novels, many of them set in Leeds between 1730 and 1957. I know this place through the soles of my feet. My work means constantly researching its history, trying to understand this city, how it shifts and changes, and the people who call it home. The longer I continue, the greater my fascination, and the deeper I dive to keep learning more. These books all beat with the heart of Leeds.


I wrote

Brass Lives

By Chris Nickson,

Book cover of Brass Lives

What is my book about?

Leeds. June, 1913. Tom Harper has risen to become Deputy Chief Constable, and the promotion brings endless meetings, paperwork, andā€¦

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The books I picked & why

Book cover of City Lights: A Street Life

Chris Nickson Why did I love this book?

Waterhouse was famous as a journalist, dramatist, and novelist. But this memoir of growing up in Leeds from the 1930s-50s brings the place and time completely alive. He didnā€™t have a privileged upbringing, by any means, and Waterhouse captures the day-to-day of poor areas and estates, and well as the magic of the city centre. The novel Billy Liar brought him fame, and while the location was unnamed, it was the Leeds heā€™d known, right down to the funeral home where he worked after leaving school. Waterhouse innately understood Leeds and its people, and they jump off the page ā€“ even if he leaves at the end (something Billy Liar could never bring himself to do). Read this and youā€™ll carry a magnificent picture of the city in your head.

By Keith Waterhouse,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked City Lights as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Keith Waterhouse was born in a world that has now vanished - a soot-blackened, tramcar-rattling provincial city. It happened to be Leeds. Waterhouse was a true city-boy, deeply mistrustful of grass and trees. In early childhood, he would roam the covered markets, the carillon-chiming arcades. As a youth he came to know the cinemas and the theatres. Then, as a junior reporter, he trod the tiled corridors of civic power. Moving "down south", his first impression of London was the sign in Piccadilly Circus; picked out in electric light bulbs, it was a heart-warming replica of the Bovril sign inā€¦


Book cover of A Local Habitation (Life And Times, Volume 1: 1918-1940)

Chris Nickson Why did I love this book?

Another memoir, but very different to Waterhouse. An academic, Hoggart had already drawn on his Leeds childhood for the seminal text, The Uses of Literacy. This expands on that, fleshing out the bones of the other work. It paints a broader picture of Leeds, overlapping a decade with City Lights. Hoggart has a prodigious memory, and while he can tend to paint the poor, working-class past with rosy colours sometimes, he certainly does evoke a time, seeing the events of the days through a childā€™s ā€“ and adolescentā€™s ā€“ eyes. He made good, going on to university, and getting a grant to travel abroad, but for those times he was a true exception. Between this and City Lights, thereā€™s a full picture of early 20th century Leeds.

By Richard Hoggart,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked A Local Habitation (Life And Times, Volume 1 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"A Local Habitation" is the first volume of Hoggart's autobiography, describing his childhood in a working class milieu in Leeds, his time at grammar school, his student days at Leeds University and his travels through Nazi Germany before World War Two. Richard Hoggart taught for many years at the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at Birmingham University and he worked with UNESCO in Paris for four years. His book "The Uses of Literacy", published over 30 years ago, established his reputation as a sensitive and well informed observer of English working class life. His most recent book, written with Douglasā€¦


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Book cover of Anatomy of Embodied Education: Creating Pathways to Brain-Mind Evolution

Anatomy of Embodied Education by E. Timothy Burns,

The vast mysterious terrain explored in this book encompasses the embodied human brain, the processes through which humans grow, develop, and learn, and the mystery of consciousness itself. We authors offer this guidebook to assist you in entering and exploring that terrain.

As parents and educators come to understand thisā€¦

Book cover of To Prove Iā€™m Not Forgot: Living And Dying In A Victorian City

Chris Nickson Why did I love this book?

This tells the story, not just of Beckett Street Cemetery, supposedly the oldest municipal cemetery in the UK, but more important of those buried there, both rich and poor (and there are plenty of both). It sits across the road from what was once Leeds Workhouse, and has its share of former inmates from there in unmarked graves. Poignantly, thereā€™s are also many guinea graves, where several are buried on top of each other, names listed on a headstone, all for a guinea (just over a pound). In its tales, this becomes a 19th-century social history of Leeds ā€“ thereā€™s even a survivor of the Battle of Waterloo buried there. Not a widely-known book, but it has a wonderful, quiet importance. I have relatives in unmarked, guinea, and regular graves.

By Sylvia M. Barnard,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked To Prove Iā€™m Not Forgot as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

With the growth of English cities during the Industrial Revolution came a booming population too vast for churchyards. Beckett Street Cemetery in Leeds was to become the first municipal cemetery in the country. This study relates how the cemetery was started and run, and describes the developing feuds between denominations. The author draws upon newspaper articles, archive material and municipal records to tell the stories of many of the people who lie there, from tiny infants, soldiers and victims of crime to those who perished in the great epidemics of Victorian England. The study throws new light on the occupationsā€¦


Book cover of A Lasting Moment: Marc Riboud Photographs Leeds 1954 and 2004

Chris Nickson Why did I love this book?

Riboud was already famous when he first arrived in Leeds to document the city in 1954. What his black and white images startlingly portray, though, is a place that could easily still be in the 19th century. He doesnā€™t go for the great and the good, but searches out ordinary people and children playing in the streets. Itā€™s life among emotional and physical rubble, a contrast to the shiny, bright colours 50 years later (and now also a part of history as time speeds by). Itā€™s searing, starkly beautiful, and the essay by Leeds-born playwright Caryl Phillips adds another dimension. Through the right eye, an image can be worth a thousand words in seeking the soul of a town and its people.

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Book cover of Rooted in Sunrise

Rooted in Sunrise by Beth Dotson Brown,

Ava Winston likes her life of routine in Lexington, Kentucky. Then a tornado blows it away. Ava is safe in the basement, but when she emerges, only one corner of her home stands. Rather than crumbling under the loss, she feels a load lifted. Maybe something beyond the familiar isā€¦

Book cover of Images of Leeds 1850-1960

Chris Nickson Why did I love this book?

Another book of photos? Yes, because these, spanning 110 years, capture the changing face of Leeds. So many of the places in these images have gone, just like the faces caught by the camera. Most of the yards and courts, the ginnels that made up the fabric of old Leeds. If Riboud acutely observed the city in 1954, this book illustrates how it reached that point. One image, a view of part of Lower Briggate in the early 1860s, might easily have come from a century earlier, with the low, bowed, battered roofs of the buildings. Another, of slums about to be demolished forms a dark juxtaposition to the bright new council houses of the 1920s as they await tenants. Itā€™s social history for the eyes.

Explore my book šŸ˜€

Brass Lives

By Chris Nickson,

Book cover of Brass Lives

What is my book about?

Leeds. June, 1913. Tom Harper has risen to become Deputy Chief Constable, and the promotion brings endless meetings, paperwork, and more responsibilities. Then a letter arrives from police in New York: Davey Mullen, an American gangster born in Leeds, is on his way back to the city, fleeing a bloody gang war.

Despite Harperā€™s best efforts to keep an eye on him, Mullenā€™s arrival triggers a series of chilling events in the city. Is he responsible for the sudden surge in crime, violence, and murder on Leedsā€™s streets? Tom has to become a real copper again and hunt down a cold-blooded killer, even as his world starts to crack apart at home.

Book cover of City Lights: A Street Life
Book cover of A Local Habitation (Life And Times, Volume 1: 1918-1940)
Book cover of To Prove Iā€™m Not Forgot: Living And Dying In A Victorian City

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