The Industrial Revolution did not happen to Leeds; Leeds happened to the Industrial Revolution. For a period in the nineteenth century, more than half of England's exports passed through the city - cloth and worsted woven in Bradford, Halifax, and Huddersfield, hauled east along the River Aire and the 1699 Aire & Calder Navigation toward Hull. Leeds was the brokerage. The 1758 Middleton Railway, granted by Act of Parliament, ran coal from the Middleton colliery to staithes at Meadow Lane just south of Leeds Bridge - the first commercial railway in the world. By 1816 the Leeds-Liverpool Canal cut clean across the Pennines. By 1835 the Leeds-Selby railway opened. The population passed two hundred thousand by mid-century. Leeds was the city of a thousand trades because it actually was - tailoring, engineering, printing, ready-made clothing, leather, locomotive building, all at once.

In a garden in Roundhay, three miles north of the centre, the French inventor Louis Le Prince filmed the world's earliest surviving motion picture on 14 October 1888 - two seconds of his son and in-laws walking in circles. He filmed Leeds Bridge the same year. Le Prince was preparing to demonstrate his invention publicly when he boarded a train at Dijon in September 1890 and was never seen again. His patents predated Edison and the Lumière brothers by years. Today the Leeds International Film Festival's Short Film Competition is named after him, and the Industrial Museum at Armley Mills shows his work to visitors who often arrive not knowing the moving image was invented here, in a city most of the world does not associate with cinema.

At the top of Briggate, the Victorian shopping arcades roof over what were once narrow yards between buildings - Cross Arcade, County Arcade, Queen's Arcade, Thornton's Arcade, all decorated in coloured tile and wrought iron and dating from the prosperity of the 1890s. The Victoria Quarter still houses some of the most expensive clothes in Leeds. Down between Briggate and the river, several medieval yards run hidden between shop-fronts; some have closed, some shelter the city's older pubs - the Angel Inn, the Ship, the Bay Horse, Queen's Court, and three-hundred-year-old Whitelocks. The Corn Exchange, Cuthbert Brodrick's domed Victorian rotunda of 1864, anchors the bohemian Exchange Quarter; its little boutiques fit into the original cast-iron shopfronts beneath the dome. The Kirkgate Market is one of the largest covered markets in Europe, a Grade I listed iron-and-glass marvel.

Leeds runs on its students - one in ten residents is enrolled at a university, with the University of Leeds, Leeds Beckett, Leeds Trinity, Leeds Arts University, and the Northern School of Contemporary Dance all in the same compact area. Headingley and the Hyde Park district carry the buzz of that scene. East of the centre, Harehills concentrates the city's Eastern European, Kurdish, South Asian, and Jamaican food cultures in one extraordinary corridor of shawarma joints, Persian tea-shops, and grocery stores. The Leeds West Indian Carnival, founded in Chapeltown in 1967, is the oldest in Western Europe and the UK's third-largest. The German Christmas market fills Millennium Square from November through December every year. The cultural mix is real, not branded - the city accommodates it.

Leeds has more publicly owned green space than any other major UK city. Roundhay Park alone covers seven hundred acres on the north-east edge. Temple Newsam, Middleton Park, Meanwood Park, the gardens at Harewood House - all sit within or just beyond the city boundary. The Leeds Country Way is a sixty-two-mile waymarked circular walk through the rural fringe, never more than seven miles from City Square. The Leeds and Liverpool Canal towpath runs west out of the centre toward the Pennines. The Aire flows quietly through the regenerated south bank, where Leeds Dock and the Royal Armouries Museum sit on what was, until the 1990s, derelict warehouse land. The dock is still a working waterway - the shuttle boat between Granary Wharf and Clarence Dock makes the short run several times a day, a reminder that the river that built the city is still part of how it moves.