Great Hall of the University of Leeds

The Great Hall
The Great Hall Building of the University of Leeds
General information
Architectural style	Gothic
Town or city	Leeds
Country	England
Coordinates	53°48′27″N 1°33′16″W / 53.807570°N 1.554547°W / 53.807570; -1.554547Coordinates: 53°48′27″N 1°33′16″W / 53.807570°N 1.554547°W / 53.807570; -1.554547
Construction started	1884
Completed	1894
Cost	£22,000+
Client	Yorkshire College
Design and construction
Architect	Alfred Waterhouse R.A.

The Great Hall is a grade II listed Gothic Revival building located at the University of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England. The building is primarily used for formal occasions such as graduation ceremonies and university students' examinations. Its undercroft was previously utilised to house the university library collections before the Brotherton Library opened in 1936. The Great Hall is one illustration of the many diverse styles of buildings on the campus of the University of Leeds; it is an example of red brick architecture associated with the term red brick university.

The Great Hall is built on a site of the former Beech Grove Hall Estate, which was purchased in 1879 by the then Yorkshire College before the college joined the now defunct Victoria University (alongside the University of Liverpool and the University of Manchester). This estate was later demolished in 1884 for it to become the site of the Clothworkers buildings of the Baines Memorial Wing and the Great Hall building itself. The buildings were designed by the late architect Alfred Waterhouse R.A (famed for his works on the Natural History Museum in London) in red pressed brick and had dressings of Bolton Wood stone in a Gothic Collegiate style.

This collegiate style used by Alfred Waterhouse helped to coin the term red brick university, a phrase first used by Edgar Allison Peers (under the pseudonym "Bruce Truscot"), a Spanish Professor at the University of Liverpool in his 1943 book Redbrick University when describing the Victoria Building, University of Liverpool. Since then, the six civic universities founded around 1900 independently use the term red brick university, these consist of the University of Birmingham, the University of Bristol, the University of Liverpool, the University of Leeds, the University of Manchester and the University of Sheffield.