Lees Urban District

Lees (or Lees Urban District) was from 1894 to 1974, a local government district in the administrative county of Lancashire, England. It was created an urban district in 1894 by the Local Government Act 1894 and included the civil parish of Lees and part of the Crossbank hamlet. It was an exclave of the administrative county of Lancaster, being bordered to the west by the county borough of Oldham, and to the east by the West Riding of Yorkshire. In 1974 Lees Urban District was abolished by the Local Government Act 1972 and its former area transferred to Greater Manchester to form part of the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham.

Nearby Places View Menu

Springhead, Greater Manchester

Springhead is a suburban area in the civil parish of Saddleworth in the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, in Greater Manchester, England.

Grotton and Springhead railway station

Grotton and Springhead railway station served the villages of Grotton and Springhead from 1856 until 1955.

616 m

Lees railway station

Lees railway station opened on 5 July 1856 at Lees, Lancashire, when the London and North Western Railway (L&NWR) opened the branch from Greenfield to Oldham. The station was located to the south-east of St. John Street, where it crossed the railway. There were two running lines with platforms on the outer sides connected by a footbridge. The main building was to the south of the line and was accessed by a ramp running down from the road over-bridge. To the south east of the station was a goods yard with a goods shed and between the station and the goods shed was a coal depôt. The goods yard was able to accommodate most types of goods including live stock and was equipped with a ten ton crane. Services Initially services ran to Oldham Mumps (L&NWR) and to Greenfield with some of these continuing to Delph. From 1 July 1862 trains were extended from Oldham Mumps to Oldham Clegg Street, later that year the L&NWR closed its Mumps station replacing it with Oldham Glodwick Road. By 1866 the station saw fourteen services in each direction (four on Sundays) of which three continued to Delph (none on Sundays). By 1922 the number of services had increased to about thirty-nine each way (there was some variation on Saturdays) of which eighteen continued to Delph (none on Sundays). In 1939 the LMS service was about the same with around thirty-eight services each way, with even more variation on Saturdays, twenty-one of which continued to Delph (except on Sundays). The station closed to passengers on 2 May 1955, when the Delph Donkey passenger train service to Delph via Greenfield was withdrawn. The station closed to goods traffic on 16 December 1963. The line remained open until 13 April 1964. Not far from the station, to the north east, was Lees Engine Shed which was open from 1878 to April 1964. Currently the line is a cyclepath and there is no evidence of the station remaining.

Lees, Greater Manchester

Lees is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Oldham, Greater Manchester, England, amongst the Pennines east of the River Medlock, 1.8 miles (2.9 km) east of Oldham, and 8.2 miles (13.2 km) northeast of Manchester. In the 14th century, when John de Leghes was a retainer of the local Lord of the Manor, 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 locals supplementing their incomes by hand-loom weaving in the domestic system. At the beginning of the 19th century, Lees had obtained a reputation for its mineral springs; ambitions to develop a spa town were thwarted by an unplanned process of urbanisation caused by the rise of textile manufacture during the Industrial Revolution. Lees expanded into a mill town in the late-19th century, on the back of neighbouring Oldham's boom in cotton spinning. Lees Urban District had eleven cotton mills at its manufacturing zenith.