Client Leeds City Council
Project 18th Century Cistercian
Abbey
Location Leeds
Services Restoration, Conservation, Architectural
Design
Kirkstall Abbey was founded in 1152 by a group of Cistercian monks who had left Fountains Abbey to found a daughter house in 1147. They eventually settled on the site in Kirkstall, in the Aire Valley near Leeds. The abbey was closed in 1539 during the Dissolution of the monasteries in the reign of Henry VIII.
It gradually fell into disrepair, and by the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the picturesque quality of the ruins inspired some of the great Romantic poets, painters and writers of the time. The site was given to Leeds City Council in the 1880s by a local benefactor, and it became a public park for the citizens of Leeds. It has remained as such until the present day.
Purcell Miller Tritton supervised a programme of repairs to the Abbey and Grounds and converted the Reredorter to house improved exhibition facilities.
The practice also prepared an Heritage Lottery Fund Stage II Bid to fund these works, which ensures that Kirkstall Abbey remains an historic site of significant local and national importance.
