Leeds Cathedral

Leeds Cathedral
Cathedral Church of St Anne
Leeds Cathedral Shown within West Yorkshire
Coordinates: 53°48′03″N 1°32′48″W / 53.8007°N 1.5468°W / 53.8007; -1.5468
Location	Leeds, West Yorkshire
Country	United Kingdom
Denomination	Roman Catholic Church
Website	dioceseofleeds.org.uk/cathedral
History
Consecrated	1904
Architecture
Architect(s)	John Henry Eastwood
Style	Neo-gothic
Years built	1901-1904
Specifications
Number of towers	1
Administration
Parish	Mother of Unfailing Help
Deanery	Leeds North
Diocese	Leeds (since 1878)
Province	Liverpool
Clergy
Bishop(s)	(since 2014)
Dean	Mgr Philip Moger (since 2008)
Laity
Director of music	Benjamin Saunders (since 2002)
Organist(s)	David Pipe (since 2016)

Leeds Cathedral, formally the Cathedral Church of St Anne, commonly known as Saint Anne's Cathedral, is the Roman Catholic Cathedral of the Roman Catholic Diocese of Leeds, and is the seat of the Roman Catholic Bishop of Leeds. It is in the city of Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. The city of Leeds does not have a Church of England cathedral, because though it is in the Anglican Diocese of Leeds, that diocese's cathedrals are in Ripon, Wakefield and Bradford.

The original cathedral was located in St Anne's Church in 1878, but that building was demolished around 1900. The current cathedral building on Cookridge Street was completed in 1904, and was restored in 2006. The reredos of the old cathedral's high altar was designed by Pugin in 1842 and moved to the lady chapel of the new cathedral. The cathedral is a Grade II* listed building.

In 1786, Lady Lane Chapel was built, the first post-reformation Catholic place of worship in the city. In 1838, it was replaced by St Anne's Church. At the time, there were only two places of Catholic worship in Leeds, St Patrick's Church (which was built in 1831) and St Anne's. The next church to be built in Leeds was Mount St Mary's Church in Richmond Hill.

The earlier St Anne’s Roman Catholic Church, built in 1838 on the corner of the Headrow and Cookridge Street was granted cathedral status in 1878 upon the creation of the Diocese of Leeds. The cathedral's life was short-lived as in 1899, Leeds Corporation pushed ahead with plans to widen The Headrow and develop it into a Boulevard style street. This meant that the cathedral was acquired by the enactment of a compulsory purchase order. Demolition started shortly after and the Leeds Permanent Building Society purchased the plot to build its head-office, the site is now The Light entertainment complex. Church officials considered several sites on which to build the second cathedral but after exhausting other options, the church accepted land offered to it by the corporation, directly adjacent to the previous church. Some architectural features of the original building were salvaged and reused in the new building and some can now be seen at the Castle-by-the-Sea Hotel in Scarborough, North Yorkshire, the former residence of the artist Atkinson Grimshaw who was the father of the first cathedral choir master, Arthur E. Grimshaw.