Queens Hall, Leeds
concert and exhibition venue in Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom
Queens Hall was a concert and exhibition venue located in Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It was originally a tram and then a bus depot and had latterly become a venue hosting events such as the Ideal Home Exhibition and the 1981, 1982, 1988 and 1989 Great British Beer Festival, flea markets, travelling fairs and concerts.
History
The building was originally constructed at the turn of the 20th century and was known as Swinegate Tram Depot. The hall was refurbished as a music venue in 1961 and was a popular venue amongst students and the townspeople of Leeds with a capacity for 5,000 people. The very first event to be held there was the Yorkshire Ideal Home & Food Exhibition (5–20 May 1961), sponsored by The Yorkshire Post.
Over the years, the Queens Hall had been as a venue for popular music. Motörhead complained about the acoustics, and it was uncomfortably cold in winter, with ice forming on the retained tramlines. As far back as the 1980s there was talk of an arena for Leeds and by that time the Queens Hall was in need of extensive modernisation to bring it up to an acceptable standard. The Queens Hall was demolished in 1989 and the site is now mostly used as a surface level car park, with redevelopment taking place on part of the site for a multi-storey car park with ground floor restaurant and an office building for BT. Construction work to add two additional storeys to the Criterion Place multi-storey car park began in July 2008.
The Leeds Arena, opened in 2013, became a new concert venue in the city.
This brief starts where responsible research should: with the source description of “Queens Hall, Leeds” as concert and exhibition venue in Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Everything that follows is an evidence route, not borrowed authority.
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The subject matters to the general reference register because the source frames it as concert and exhibition venue in Leeds, West Yorkshire, United Kingdom. Its deeper value depends on whether names, dates, institutions and citations support that framing.
The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7270772. Authority coordinates are 53.794, -1.544. 2 of 2 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1981, 1982, 1988 and 1989.
The absence of detail may reflect summary conventions rather than a lack of surviving documentation. The source lead contains qualifying language; that uncertainty should survive quotation, summary and reuse. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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This entry incorporates text from “Queens Hall, Leeds” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.