Heritage Open Days 2024 Preview: Leeds’ Rhubarb Routes
Ahead of the Heritage Open Days Festival, we find out about the Rhubarb Routes event being hosted by Hollybush Conservation Centre in Kirkstall on 15th September.
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00:00Hollybush is a conservation centre in Kirkstall Bramley border area of Leeds.
00:07We have been here since 1979 and we're part of a national charity called the Conservation
00:12Volunteers. Basically the aim of the Conservation Volunteers is to connect
00:17people with green spaces for the benefit of both. Earlier in the summer we had a blue plaque
00:23installed with Leeds Civic Trust so that we could celebrate a guy called Joseph Whitwell who was a
00:30gentleman farmer who was based at Hollybush from around 1860 and he grew to be one of the
00:40the most successful farmers in Leeds. He was at one point producing more rhubarb from this farm
00:47than anywhere else in the world and we thought that we should celebrate him. So our Heritage
00:55Open Day is a chance to invite people in to see the place that he farmed, learn a bit more about
01:01rhubarb and why Hollybush is a really good location for growing rhubarb and why that helped him become
01:09so successful. For this Heritage Open Day we'll be opening up the tunnel that runs under the
01:15railway tracks so that people can see out into the the land that would have been farmed
01:22as part of the the big rhubarb farm that was here. We think of Wakefield as being like the main centre
01:28of the rhubarb triangle but Leeds was the real pioneer in growing rhubarb. We are connected by
01:34lots of different routes and pathways, transport systems. So there was shoddy coming up from the
01:42textile mills on the canal which was used to fertilise the plants. You could get coal coming
01:48in on the railways. There was a train that went down to London called the Rhubarb Express so
01:54there's lots of factors that make it perfect for rhubarb growing.