Although the stagecoach as the prime form of intercity transport had ceased to operate by mid 19th century, such coaches were still to be seen working in smaller towns and suburbs, and for summer outings and visits to the ‘watering places’ or spa towns of Yorkshire until the end of the century. The nine principal coaching inns in Leeds con tinued to be termini for the new bus routes and the stabling of horses.

Before 1600 only the aristocracy and very senior figures travelled by coach, and it was not a comfortable experience. Horses were hired by the stage. Some women and sick people might be carried on horse litters. Subsequently broad-wheeled stage wagons, drawn by eight to ten horses with the driver riding alongside on a separate horse, were introduced. The stagecoach as such appeared by about 1640 in which year there just six stage coaches in the country. By 1658 there were three departures weekly from London to York. In 1678 Ralph Thoresby travelled home from Holland via Hull and stagecoach to York; from there he took a horse since coaches to Leeds did not operate in winter. Thoresby also visited London by coach taking four to six days each way.

Leeds has long played a supraregional role in passenger transport. An extraordinary census taken in 1686 of the inn accommodation in the whole of England, a sort of Michelin guide of its time, ranked Leeds fifth in Yorkshire for its provision of stabling and services for 454 horses and 294 guest beds. The stagecoach service was only as good as the roads it used. The period 1740–60 saw the introduction of a national network of turnpike roads – privately owned toll roads – and consequent improvement of road surfaces and maintenance. Many rate - payers and other local road users saw this as a disadvantage. In Yorkshire in 1753 there was one of the most serious ‘turnpike riots’. Turnpike buildings and gates were destroyed. Soldiers were called out from Leeds and eight protesters were killed with forty wounded, some of whom later died.

The next 50 years or so saw regular improvements in speed, comfort and price. From 1765 coaches left Leeds on schedule from the New King’s Inn in Briggate (later the Royal Hotel). The newer, faster coaches, ‘flying machines’ on steel springs, could do the journey from Leeds to London, a distance of about 192 miles, in two days, with just six passengers, four to six horses, a driver and postilion. But the cost was high at £2 6s. The Leeds Royal Mail in 1785, the fastest of all services, took only 26 hours but charged £3 3s, 3 guineas, a smart sum. These rates were equivalent to some airfares or full firstclass rail fares today. The slow coaches charged £1 11s 6d inside and £1 1s outside. Whatever the fare the discomforts, delays and accidents were not too dissimilar. There was also the risk of hold-ups. Even Highgate Hill, now very much part of northern inner London, within sight of St Paul’s Cathedral, was known as a black spot for highway robbery. Press gangs sometimes operated on main routes, another form of extortion. The expansion of the stagecoach service can be shown by figures for the number of coaches arriving at and departing from Leeds daily. In 1800 there were just 40 – by 1838 this had risen to 150.

There were direct services to London, Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Hull and Scarborough (via York). Connections could be made to the furthest parts of the kingdom. The interest in their movements gave rise to the first ‘coach spotters’ in transport history.

In Leeds one of the leading stagecoach proprietors was Matthew Outhwaite. He started in 1815 with services from the Bull and Mouth in Briggate and the Royal Hotel (from 1823). His stagecoach service continued until 1846. For several years he teamed up with the Atkinson brothers who had a service that ran from the Albion in the years1836–42. Outhwaite diversified his transport interests and maximised his opportunities. He was also a freight carrier, and after the start of the railways was among the first to introduce a ‘railway bus’ to provide a service to the new railway station.

Urban transport
What was transport like for people in Leeds in about 1825? The previous year had seen a ‘Leeds Improvement Act’ that required all ‘hackney carriages, cars, gigs, and sedan chairs to be licensed’. Most of these had stands in Briggate or nearby. This was the beginning of municipal regulation of urban transport, which was to increase greatly later in the century.

The size of the town and locations of surrounding villages and industrial sites were such that most people could quite easily walk to work and to places of local enter tainment. This was travelling by ‘shank’s mare’ or ‘shank’s pony’.

The crowded narrow inner streets were shared by cattle, pigs and other creatures, especially on market days. The upper classes had their private carriages. This entailed ownership of a coach, at least two horses and probably a coachman and groom, and stables. Elegant ladies and some gentlemen might require a sedan chair to save their costumes from the mud and prevent them arriving out of breath. The sedan chair, a French invention, was in use in Leeds from the beginning of its modest ‘Georgian’ period in about 1767. They were one-person vehicles, a small covered carriage on two poles and a stand, carried by two ‘chairmen’. These were in use in the 1820s but became increasingly rare in following years. Of course many people would ride from outlying villages and suburbs, to market and, on other occasions, on horses, with pony and trap and on all sorts of fourwheeled ‘wagons’ that were mainly designed for the transport of goods and produce. There were also various passenger wagons or carts, also sometimes called ‘cars’. There were modified goods vehicles that might carry six to twelve people. Entrepreneurs, especially innkeepers, ran these on market days to bring in people from the villages.

A still quite new and fashionable form of transport for one or two people was the hansom cab. The general term for these vehicles was ‘hackney carriage’, hackney being a name for a horse and so denoting a horse-drawn carriage for hire. Mr Hansom invented an advanced form known as ‘Hansom cabs’. Here cab is short for cabriolet, a two-wheeled enclosed carriage for two passengers. The driver sat behind with the reins going over the roof. In 1875 there were 4,000 cab drivers in Leeds for whom 43 cabmen’s shelters had been erected. In 1830, before the advent of railways, Leeds had 180 ‘carriers’, small businesses dealing in the transport of goods, with various wagons and fly-vans. They operated by land and ‘coastwise and by canal’, as the brochures of the time said. There were no fewer than 122 principal destinations with daily or weekly services.

There were 13 Leeds carriers who specifically linked up with canals and river navigation systems. Some carriers advertised fast boats to Hull to connect with ‘steam packets to Holland and Germany’. Journey times by water continued to improve; the journey by canal from Leeds to Liverpool took only two days. It is very clear that there was an extensive, integrated and systematic combination of forms of transport at this time. Until steamboats became widespread, horses were employed both for road and canal transport. The primary fuel was therefore corn and hay.

In July 1840, the year of the introduction of the Penny Post, the North Midland Railway opened, and the ‘Express’, a Leeds mail coach that had started in 1817, ran its last trip to London from the Royal Hotel. In areas not yet served by rail, new stagecoach services were still being started, for example from Ilkley to Leeds in 1841, and from Harrogate to Thirsk in 1842.

The train had dramatically shortened the time from Leeds to London. Between about 1785–1830 the fastest coach could travel the distance in thirty hours or so. In 1845 the train took eight hours and in 1910, a mere four.