Place:Lees, Lancashire, England

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NameLees
Alt namesHeysource: Family History Library Catalog
County Endsource: local name for township
Leesfieldsource: ecclesiastical name for township
TypeUrban district
Coordinates53.533°N 2.067°W
Located inLancashire, England     ( - 1974)
See alsoSalford Hundred, Lancashire, Englandhundred in which it was located
Prestwich cum Oldham, Lancashire, Englandancient parish in which it was part located
Ashton under Lyne, Lancashire, Englandancient parish in which it was part located
Crossbank, Lancashire, Englandparish which joined Lees Urban District in 1914
Oldham (metropolitan borough), Greater Manchester, Englandmetropolitan borough in which it has been located since 1974
source: Getty Thesaurus of Geographic Names
source: Family History Library Catalog
the following text is based on an article in Wikipedia

Lees (pop. 4,500 in 2011) has been since 1974 a suburb within the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, in Greater Manchester, England. It lies amongst the Pennines on elevated ground on the east side of the River Medlock, east of Oldham, and east-northeast of central Manchester. From 1894 until 1974 Lees was an urban district located on the Lancashire side of the county boundary with the West Riding of Yorkshire, giving rise to a part of Lees being known locally as County End.

Lees is believed to have obtained its name in the 14th century from John de Leghes, a retainer of the local Lord of the Manor. For centuries, Lees was a conglomeration of hamlets, ecclesiastically linked with the township of Ashton under Lyne. Farming was the main industry of this rural area, with inhabitants supplementing their incomes by hand-loom weaving with the goods sold through a travelling agent. At the beginning of the 19th century Lees had obtained a reputation for its mineral springs; ambitions to develop Lees into a spa town were thwarted by an unplanned process of urbanisation caused by introduction and profitability of textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution.

Image:Oldham.png

Lees expanded into a factory village during the late-19th century on the back of neighbouring Oldham's booming cotton spinning sector. The former Lees Urban District (1894-1974), an area of 0.4 square miles (1 km2), had eleven cotton mills at its manufacturing zenith.

Lees was one of the localities which, on 16 August 1819, sent a contingent of parishioners to the mass public demonstration at Manchester, now known as the Peterloo Massacre. In the week before Peterloo (an assembly demanding the reform of parliamentary representation), weavers in Lees had paraded through the village with a large black flag adorned with the slogans "no Borough Mongering, Taxation Without Representation is Unject and Tyrannical," and "Unite and be Free, Equal Representation or Death". The growing unrest in the village prompted one alarmed inhabitant to write to the Home Office.

Lees was also known as Leesfield. This referred to its chapelry which was linked to the ancient parishes of both Prestwich cum Oldham (Oldham township and borough) and Ashton under Lyne which was considered to be a single-township parish.

The following description from John Marius Wilson's Imperial Gazetteer of England and Wales of 1870-72 is provided by the website A Vision of Britain Through Time (University of Portsmouth Department of Geography).

"LEESFIELD, a parochial chapelry in Prestwich and Ashton under Lyne parishes, Lancashire; containing the post office village of Lees, and including a portion of Oldham borough. It was constituted in 1846. Population in 1861: 5,358. Houses: 1,066. Population of the Prestwich portion: 1,902. Houses: 374. The living is a [perpetual] curacy in the diocese of Manchester. Value: £300. Patron: alternately the Crown and the Bishop. The church was built in 1848, at a cost of £5,200; is in the later English style; and has a fine tower. There are chapels for New Connexion Methodists, Primitive Methodists, and Brethren. There are also national schools and a large British school; and the former were built shortly before 1865, at a cost of £1,500."

Lees Urban District

Between 1894 and 1974, Lees constituted the Lees Urban District, in the administrative county of Lancashire. As the district was situated entirely between the County Borough of Oldham (county boroughs were independent of county control) and the West Riding of Yorkshire, it constituted an exclave of the administrative county of Lancashire. In 1911 part of the urban district was added to the civil parish of Crossbank, but in 1914 Crossbank was absorbed into the Lees Urban District. The urban district survived until 1974 when it joined with Oldham and other surrounding urban districts into Oldham Metropolitan Borough.

Research Tips

  • See the Wikipedia articles on parishes and civil parishes for descriptions of this lowest rung of local administration. The original parishes were ecclesiastical (described as ancient parishes), under the jurisdiction of the local priest. A parish covered a specific geographical area and was sometimes equivalent to that of a manor. Sometimes, in the case of very large rural parishes, there were chapelries where a "chapel of ease" allowed parishioners to worship closer to their homes. In the 19th century the term civil parish was adopted to define parishes with a secular form of local government. In WeRelate both civil and ecclesiastical parishes are included in the type of place called a "parish". Smaller places within parishes, such as chapelries and hamlets, have been redirected into the parish in which they are located. The names of these smaller places are italicized within the text.
  • An urban district was a type of municipality in existence between 1894 and 1974. They were formed as a middle layer of administration between the county and the civil parish and were used for urban areas usually with populations of under 30,000. Inspecting the archives of a urban district will not be of much help to the genealogist or family historian, unless there is need to study land records in depth.
  • Civil registration or vital statistics and census records will be found within registration districts. To ascertain the registration district to which a parish belongs, see Registration Districts in Lancashire, part of the UK_BMD website.
  • The terms municipal borough and county borough were adopted in 1835 replacing the historic "boroughs". Municipal boroughs generally had populations between 30,000 and 50,000; while county boroughs usually had populations of over 50,000. County boroughs had local governments independent of the county in which they were located, but municipal boroughs worked in tandem with the county administration. Wikipedia explains these terms in much greater detail.
  • Lancashire Online Parish Clerks provide free online information from the various parishes, along with other data of value to family and local historians conducting research in the County of Lancashire.
  • FamilySearch Lancashire Research Wiki provides a good overview of the county and also articles on most of the individual parishes (very small or short-lived ones may have been missed).
  • Ancestry (international subscription necessary) has a number of county-wide collections of Church of England baptisms, marriages and burials, some from the 1500s, and some providing microfilm copies of the manuscript entries. There are specific collections for Liverpool (including Catholic baptisms and marriages) and for Manchester. Their databases now include electoral registers 1832-1935. Another pay site is FindMyPast.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1888 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time includes the boundaries between the parishes and shows the hamlets within them.
  • A map of Lancashire circa 1954 supplied by A Vision of Britain through Time is a similar map for a later timeframe.
  • GENUKI provides a website covering many sources of genealogical information for Lancashire. The organization is gradually updating the website and the volunteer organizers may not have yet picked up all the changes that have come with improving technology.
  • The Victoria County History for Lancashire, provided by British History Online, covers the whole of the county in six volumes (the seventh available volume [numbered Vol 2] covers religious institutions). The county is separated into its original hundreds and the volumes were first published between 1907 and 1914. Most parishes within each hundred are covered in detail. Maps within the text can contain historical information not available elsewhere.
  • A description of the parish of Ashton under Lyne from British History Online (Victoria County Histories), published 1911. This makes various references to Lees and provides a map which shows Lees in the northernmost section of the parish.


This page uses content from the English Wikipedia. The original content was at Lees, Greater Manchester. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. As with WeRelate, the content of Wikipedia is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.