History
Nearly a thousand years of the land Skelton Gate sits on, and the area around it.
The estate stands on ground that was mined for the best part of two centuries. Waterloo Main Colliery, a deep mine sunk in 1815, worked the coal here until 1968, and the Skelton opencast site took what was left between 1989 and 1994 before the land was backfilled and restored to farmland.
There’s an article here mentioning the area, and the lost pit village just down by Skelton Lake. The village was officially designated Irwin Square, but was known locally as Waterloo, or Waterlooville after the colliery. The OS Survey map from 1852 of the area, shows the site of the village between the river and canal. There’s also this video discussing the village, and trying to track down evidence.
That final opencast episode is what made the landscape we live in. The River Aire, which had meandered across these fields for as long as anyone had mapped it, was straightened onto its present line running parallel to the canal; the deepest void was left to fill and became Skelton Lake; and the rest was backfilled and restored to farmland, which is what it still was when the developers bought it.
Skelton Gate development planning began in the 2010s as part of Leeds City Council’s vision to create sustainable, connected communities on the outskirts of the city. Outline consent for up to 1,100 homes, a school, a local centre and public open space was granted in November 2017 (original planning application 15/07655/OT). Colton Beck, which Beckside Crescent is named for, still runs through the middle of the site.
Groundworks began in 2022, with the first residents moving in late 2023.
- 1086
Domesday Book
The manor of Neuhusam — new houses, the origin of Newsam — is recorded in the Domesday survey, held by Ilbert de Lacy. The neighbouring settlement of Thorpe, later Thorpe Stapleton, carries a Danish name, so it was already here before the Norman Conquest.Source - 1155
The Knights Templar arrive
Henry de Lacy gives land at Newsam, Skelton, Colton and Whitkirk to the Knights Templar “for the salvation of my soul”. They build a preceptory — part monastery, part farm — and the estate is Temple Newsam from then on.Source - 1307
The Templars are suppressed
The Order is dissolved and the estate confiscated by the Crown. The name sticks even though the knights do not: it has been Temple Newsam ever since.Source - 14th century
Thorpe Stapleton Hall
A semi-castellated hall stands on the north bank of the Aire, just west of where the estate is today, held by the Stapleton family. It was reckoned among the oldest buildings in Leeds. Nothing of it survives.Source - 1537
Lord Darcy loses his head
Thomas, Lord Darcy of Temple Newsam joins the Pilgrimage of Grace, the northern rising against Henry VIII’s dissolution of the monasteries, and surrenders Pontefract Castle to the rebels. He is executed on Tower Hill and the King seizes the estate.Source - 1545
A king is born down the road
Henry VIII grants Temple Newsam to his niece Margaret, Countess of Lennox. Her son Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, is born in the house — later the husband of Mary, Queen of Scots, and father of James I. Elizabeth I confiscates the estate again in 1565 over that marriage.Source - 1622
The Ingrams buy the estate
Sir Arthur Ingram, a self-made and famously ruthless businessman, buys Temple Newsam for £12,000 and rebuilds it. His descendants are made Viscounts of Irvine — anglicised by the family to Irwin — and hold the estate for three hundred years. When a pit village goes up on their land in 1821, its square is named Irwin Square after them.Source - 1700
The canal opens
An Act of Parliament the year before authorises the Aire & Calder Navigation, and on 20 November 1700 the first large vessels from the Humber reach Leeds Bridge. The canal still runs along the southern edge of the area, past Skelton Lake.Source - 1815
Waterloo Colliery is sunk
William Fenton, one of the “Coal Kings” of Yorkshire, sinks a shaft at Thorpe Stapleton and names the colliery Waterloo, after the battle fought that year. The Fentons had already been working coal under the Temple Newsam estate for a century.Source - 1821
The pit village is built
Fenton puts up a village for his miners on the land between the river and the canal — said to be the earliest purpose-built pit village in West Yorkshire. Two rows of cottages, a square and a school, joined to the colliery by a wooden footbridge over the Aire. It collects more names than anywhere its size deserves: first Newmarket, then Irwin Square on the Ordnance Survey maps and Ingram Place on the census — both after the family at Temple Newsam, who were Ingrams before they were Viscounts Irwin — while everyone who lived there just called it Waterloo.Source - 1834
The railway
The Leeds & Selby Railway opens, the first main line in Yorkshire, running east out of Marsh Lane. Woodlesford station follows on 1 July 1840.Source - 1865
A Test cricketer is born in the village
Albert Ward is born in the colliers’ village on 21 November. He goes on to play for Yorkshire and then Lancashire, is named a Wisden Cricketer of the Year in 1890, and scores a century for England against Australia. Seven Test caps, from a village that no longer exists.Source - 1890s
The village disappears
Waterlooville outlives its usefulness long before the coal runs out. As the older pits wind down it falls derelict, most of it gone by the 1890s and the remainder cleared around the turn of the century. Nothing survives above ground: the most anyone has found is a stretch of the old school wall, hidden under a bridge.Source - 1913
Temple Pit is sunk
By now only two of the Waterloo pits are still producing, and a new shaft is sunk between 1913 and 1914 in the woods south-east of Temple Newsam house, bounded by Bullerthorpe Lane and Pontefract Lane. Temple Pit outlasts all the others.Source - 1914
Wyke Beck diverted
Wyke Beck is rerouted alongside the opening of the Knostrop sewage works. It had originally run through what is now Skelton Lake, and still meets the Aire beside it. (The beck through the estate itself, the one Beckside Crescent is named for, is Colton Beck.)Source - 1922
Temple Newsam becomes public
Edward Wood sells the estate to the City of Leeds for £35,000, well under its worth. The grounds open to the public on 19 October 1923 — the park and golf course residents still walk to today.Source - 1942
Opencast comes to Temple Newsam
Opencast mining begins on the estate in May, and seven sites are eventually worked south of the house — largely destroying Capability Brown’s landscape. The last of it is not finished until 1987.Source - 1951
Skelton Grange power station
The old Skelton Grange farm is demolished in the late 1940s to make way for a coal-fired power station. The ‘A’ station’s first unit is commissioned in April 1951; a second station, ‘B’, follows between 1958 and 1962. Its cooling towers dominated the skyline south of the estate for forty years.Source - 1968
The last pit in Leeds closes
Temple Pit at Waterloo Main closes in December — the last deep coal mine worked in Leeds. The final coal train ran to Neville Hill the month before, and the colliery buildings come down in 1973 — seventy years after the village that housed the first Waterloo miners had vanished.Source - 1987
The last of the Temple Newsam opencast
Forty-five years after it began, opencast working on the Temple Newsam estate finally stops at Gamblethorpe, within sight of the house. The parkland is re-landscaped and today no trace of it remains.Source - 1989–94
The ground beneath the estate
The Skelton opencast site is worked: a cluster of five surface pits across roughly 3 square kilometres, dug in places to 44 metres below sea level. This is the coal that lay under Skelton Gate, and this is when the landscape we live in was made. The River Aire, which had meandered across these fields for as long as anyone had mapped it, is straightened onto its present line running parallel to the canal — it had to go before the coal beneath its old loops could be reached. Afterwards the ground is backfilled and restored to farmland, which is what the developers bought.Source - 1992
Skelton Grange Environment Centre
The Conservation Volunteers open an environment centre on four hectares of reclaimed land by the river. It is still running, and still takes volunteers.Source - 1995
The towers come down
Skelton Grange ‘A’ had closed in 1983 and ‘B’ in 1994. On 12 November 1995 the cooling towers and chimneys are demolished, and clearance of the site is finished by 1998.Source - late 1990s
Skelton Lake fills
Coaling stops in 1994, and the deepest part of the void — never backfilled — is left to fill with groundwater. Over the second half of the decade it becomes the 60-acre lake we have now. No record gives an exact date for either the lake or the river straightening; what is certain is that neither existed before 1990 and both were there by 2000. - 1999
The M1 arrives
The M1–A1 link opens in February, swinging the motorway east of Leeds and creating junction 45 on the estate’s doorstep. Eight miles of new motorway, and the reason there is a service station here at all.Source - 2012
Aire Valley enterprise zone
The Aire Valley is launched as a government-backed enterprise zone, and this land is designated for employment — factories and sheds, not houses. Turning it into a place to live needed that policy to change, which is why the Skelton Gate consent and the Aire Valley Area Action Plan arrive in the same month five years later.Source - 2017
Skelton Gate is approved
Outline planning consent (15/07655/OT) is granted in November for a new community of up to 1,100 homes, a school, a local centre and public open space. A first attempt at motorway services here had been refused back in 2005; permission for those is granted earlier the same year.Source - 2020
Skelton Lake services open
The £64m service station opens in late March, in the first week of the COVID lockdown — initially just the shop and the fuel pumps. It is billed as the greenest services in the country, with a living roof and an RSPB wildlife visitor centre looking out over the lake.Source - 2022
Groundworks begin
Housebuilders agree terms on phase 1 in February and work starts on site in the autumn. The East Leeds Orbital Route opens that August.Source - 2023
The first residents move in
The first homes are handed over, and Skelton Gate becomes a place people live rather than a planning reference. - 2025
Phase 2 and the energy-from-waste plant
Taylor Wimpey submit reserved matters (25/02886/RM) for phases 2a, 2b and 2c — 370 homes. To the south, the £500m Skelton Grange energy-from-waste plant takes its first delivery in March and becomes fully operational in September, on the site of the old power station.Source - 2027
What's next
Phase 1 is expected to complete by mid-2027, with Hill Park expected by the end of that year. Taylor Wimpey’s phase 2 is not yet fully approved, but a start is expected during 2027. See the Development Phases page for where things actually stand, and Local Planning for the status of the applications themselves.