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If you walk out of the front door of this building, turn left and walk for ten minutes along Woodhouse Lane and across the piece of parkland called Woodhouse Moor, you come to Hyde Park Corner. This is the site of the first telephone in Europe. A few yards further, and, on your right hand side, you will see Cumberland Road where the Braggs lived when they were doing their Nobel Prize-winning work immediately after the Great War. On the other side of the Road is the site of the old Wool Institute Research building, where Martin and Synge won their Nobel prize for the development of chromatography. Ten minutes more walking will take you to Headingley where William Astbury (pioneer of molecular biology) lived. - But more of him later from Prof. North.

If instead, you turn right outside this building, in a hundred yards you will come to the Chemistry Department, where, in the bad winter of 1947, Kathleen Lonsdale, taking advantage of the low temperatures, put an X-ray diffraction camera on the roof of the building and solved the crystal structure of ice and hexamethylbenzene, showing definitively that the aromatic ring was flat and the carbon-carbon bonds were all of the same length (a piece of physics that solved, with no room for argument, one of the central questions in organic chemistry). Beyond this building were the old physics and engineering departments of William Stroud and Archibald Barr, the Braggs and Edmund Stoner.

If you continue walking down the hill into town, you will find, in an alley opposite W.H. Smith's, a blue plaque marking the place where, in 1824, the Leeds bricklayer, Joseph Aspdin invented Portland cement. Less than a hundred yards away, in Commercial Street is the Leeds Library, the private subscription library started by Joseph Priestley in 1780. A further hundred yards will take you past the site of the world's first traffic lights, to Mill Hill, the site of Priestley's church where he discovered nine gases, demonstrated the chemistry of photosynthesis, invented carbonated drinks and rewrote the book - literally and metaphorically, on electricity and magnetism.

The statue of Joseph Priestley on the site of his old chapel, Mill Hill (City Square Leeds)

A fine statue in City Square depicts him frozen in the act of discovering oxygen, focussing sunlight onto mercury oxide (in a mortar, for some reason, with the pestle left in it). If you are travelling back by train, from the elevated position of the western platforms you can see a pair of fine Italianate factory chimneys, dating from the beginning of the industrial revolution that brought in unequal measures prosperity, poverty and pollution to Leeds.

Behind them is the site of the Round Foundry where Matthew Murray built the finest steam engines of the day - and around that, the land which the malevolent James Watt bought up to stop him expanding his business - and the Tower which Watt built to spy on the activities of Murray's workforce. But even more remarkable, there is John Marshall's 1830 Temple Mill . The exterior in a strange Egyptian style modelled on a temple at Edfu on the upper Nile - but there is nothing classical about the interior. This was arguably the first modern factory in the world - all on one level under a single roof, gas lighting, and with the temperature and humidity control required for flax spinning.

Marshall's Temple Mill, Exterior and Interior

This square mile of land has as much right as anywhere on earth to be called the cradle of the industrial revolution. The locomotive designed and built in 1812 by Matthew Murray at the Leeds Round Foundry for John Blenkinsop's Middleton Railway

It was here that the Kitsons built the railway locomotives for four continents and the steam farm engines that opened up the American Mid West to agriculture. By rights, this should be a World Heritage Site. If alternatively, you are travelling south by road you will notice that for the first half mile of it towards the M1, the M621 is a raised motorway. It carries you over the Middleton Railway - the oldest working railway in the world.

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