Book excerpt: Table of contents: Leeds is a city with a rich commercial tradition and fine buildings to match. Its prosperity, founded on the wool trade, is reflected in the seventeenth-century church of St John, with its magnificent Jacobean woodcarving and furnishings, while the town's eighteenth-century expansion produced elegant Georgian parades and squares with homes for wealthy merchants. They now stand cheek-by-jowl with solid, proud warehouses and offices of the railway age in a wonderful variety of styles ranging from elegant neo-Grecian to Gothic, Moorish and Egyptian.