Britain's corn exchanges were the trading floors of the 19th century grain economy: places where farmers, millers, and merchants met to sample wheat and barley, settle prices, and write contracts. The first Leeds corn exchange opened in 1829 at the north end of Briggate. By the 1850s it was too small for the booming Yorkshire grain trade and the civic authorities decided to commission something on a different scale. Cuthbert Brodrick was already at work on Leeds Town Hall when he was given the corn exchange brief. He produced an elliptical building with diamond-rusticated stonework on the exterior, completed in 1863 and opened for trade in 1864. It was listed Grade I in 1951, the highest category of protection.

The interior is what makes the building. Brodrick covered the elliptical trading floor with a wrought-iron and glass dome whose ribs spring from the walls and meet at the lantern above. Light pours down on the floor below. Wooden offices line two upper galleries that run around the inside, originally let to grain dealers, now to clothing boutiques, tattoo studios, vinyl shops, and coffee bars. Nikolaus Pevsner, writing his Buildings of England guides in the 20th century, was not given to enthusiasm. He called Brodrick's design remarkably independent and functional, the architectural equivalent of a standing ovation. The Yale University Press updated edition of his Leeds volume in 2005 still treats the exchange as one of the city's defining Victorian buildings.

The Great Depression of British Agriculture, which began in the 1870s and dragged on into the 1890s, broke the corn exchange economy. Cheap North American grain flooded into Liverpool, prices collapsed, and the great Yorkshire grain traders thinned out. By the 20th century the Leeds Corn Exchange was a working trading floor in name only. Speciality Shops plc restored the building in the late 1980s and converted it into a retail facility, threading small independent shops around Brodrick's galleries. Zurich Financial Services took it over and reopened it in November 2008 as a boutique shopping centre, with the 13,200 square foot ground level given over to a restaurant called Piazza by Anthony. Piazza closed suddenly in June 2013. The shops kept going.

In 2017 the property company Rushbond acquired the building and continued the independent-retail model. The Corn Exchange today houses about thirty small businesses: clothes, records, books, tattoos, jewellery, coffee, vegan food. It is now described as one of only three corn exchanges in Britain still functioning as a centre for trade, even if the trade is no longer cereal. The dome has also become a venue: in June 2023 the South Asian Arts UK Summer Solstice Festival filled the floor with music and dance until 5 am, part of the Leeds 2023 cultural programme. The BBC used the building as a backdrop in its 2021 Rugby League World Cup trailer, in honour of Leeds being one of the host cities. Brodrick's exchange has outlived its original purpose by a century and a half, and looks set to outlive several more reinventions.