IT was a battle to get to the A1 at Boroughbridge.

But the damage as we stewed in bank holiday traffic after a trip to Leeds - the radiator boiled over - did not compare with that inflicted during another attempt, nearly 250 years ago, to reach the Great North Road from, then as now, the West Riding's industrial and commercial powerhouse.

It was at the time of the turnpike revolution. The country's prosperity was being held back by the desperate state of the highways. A multitude of Turnpike Acts were passed by Parliament, each allowing the collection of tolls on an important route to help pay for road maintenance. But there was often violent resistance to paying the tolls.

In June 1753 massed ranks of armed rioters attacked the new turnpike at Harewood Bridge which charged for use of the road from Leeds to Boroughbridge via Harrogate and Knaresborough. The first Lord Harewood organised some 300 of his tenants and workmen to repulse them. There were many injuries and 30 rioters were taken prisoner.

Worse was to follow. A week later, turnpike protesters rampaged in Leeds itself. The mayor read the Riot Act in vain. Soldiers (brought along the already repaired road from York) opened fire. Eight rioters were killed outright and several others among the 40 injured died later.

That aside, and although the splendid Royal Armouries museum, bristling with exotic weaponry and much bellicose else, was our first port of call in the city, most of the rest of the local history we gleaned during our walkabout in Leeds was reassuringly peaceful - but, at least since the time of its origins well over 1,000 years ago as the hamlet of Loidis in Elmete, Leeds has rarely been sleepy.

(The Venerable Bede, writing in the early 8th century, mentions a Loidis in his History of the English Church and People, but that may refer to a district rather than any specific settlement).

We soon felt at home: the first tourist information board along our walk from the Royal Armouries along the towpath of the canalised River Aire showed a drawing of the city by the brothers Samuel and Nathaniel Buck who featured in Past Lives of August 24 as 18th-century recorders of such D&S Times-land as Mount Grace Priory, Easby Abbey and Richmond Castle.

The bucolic Leeds as seen by the Bucks does have something in common with today's throbbing near-metropolis besides the towers and steeple of three prominent churches that survive. The Aire, on which there are boats surprisingly large for 1745 (in 1700 the river had been made navigable, via the Ouse, to Hull), will surely have been alive with fish - and anglers we met on the stretch of river near Tetley's brewery said they are again catching perch, gudgeon, roach and even trout.

For very many years until the late 1990s, that had not been possible. Industrial pollution, especially from the dyeworks associated with the cloth trade, had killed the river; there was invariably an oily blue smear on the water. Today the surface is shiny enough to carry striking reflections of formerly derelict warehouses, now converted into smart apartment buildings. A multi-million pound sewage treatment works was completed in 1997 and the city claims it now has its cleanest river since the Industrial Revolution.

How bad was it? Well, in 1866 the Inspector of Nuisances reported "an enormous number of dead dogs, cats and pigs" brought down into the Aire by three city-centre becks. In the half-mile to where the Leeds-Liverpool canal branches from the river, "you might, if you set yourself to it, take out 50 every day of the year".

That's the stretch of riverside where Asda now has its spanking, modern head office, opposite apartment buildings where once stood the mighty works of Goodall, Backhouse and Co, who in Victorian times supplied the British Empire with vast quantities of custard powder, baking powder, egg powder, ginger beer powder, quinine wine and, most famously, 6m bottles a year of Yorkshire relish.

In 1857, Leeds philosophical and literary society heard these lines from William Osburn:

The Aire below is dyed and dammed;

The Air above with lurid smoke is crammed;

The One flows steaming foul as Charon's Styx,

Its poisonous vapours in the other mix.

These sable twins the murky town invest,

By them the skin's begrimed, the lungs oppressed.

How dear the penalty thus paid for wealth

Obtained through wasted life and broken health.

WHAT major city worth its salt does not boast of at least one pioneering achievement? Leeds, perhaps to make amends for being cast as a Luddite of road transport because of the turnpike riots two centuries earlier, claims that in 1928 it installed Britain's first permanent traffic lights in Park Row.

There's that, there's the "discovery of oxygen" by 18th century Leeds clergymen-cum-scientist Joseph Priestley; the founding there of both the Marks & Spencer and Montague Burton empires; and no doubt a myriad seminal advances in the woollen trade and other industrial processes. But surely the city's most ambitious claim is to have been host to the invention of moving pictures.

Stand aside, the brothers Lumire of Lyon, Friese-Green of Bath and Thomas Edison of the US. Make way for Louis Aim Auguste Le Prince, who spent nearly half of his life in Leeds and - says a blue plaque on a building flanking the city's main bridge over the Aire - here had a workshop "where he invented a one-lens camera and a projecting machine. Le Prince produced what are believed to be the world's first moving pictures taken on Leeds bridge in 1888."

The date, at least, supports that claim. My encyclopaedias, none of which mentions Le Prince, admit that Edison did not invent cinematography but greatly improved its machinery; give 1893 for the Lumires' first cine camera; and say Friese-Green showed his first successful pictures in 1890.

And a short journey to the National Museum of Photography, Film and Television in Bradford, the down-on-its-luck city which has just suffered the indignity of a suggestion that some of the Leeds dynamism might rub off on it if it adopted the LS postcode, confirmed to us that Le Prince's brief film of busy horse-drawn traffic on Leeds bridge is excitingly watchable.

Le Prince was born in Metz in 1842 and received some instruction in photography from a friend of his father - a chap by the name of Daguerre. An English fellow-student at Leipzig university invited him to Leeds in the 1860s and there he married the friend's sister, with whom he founded the school of applied art in Park Square. He took his wife to America in the 1880s and continued experiments started in Leeds. In 1886 he applied for an American patent for a movie camera before returning to Leeds, from where early in 1888 he sought a British patent.

His son and three Leeds men, including a Whitley, helped with trials of his camera and the projector he had also made. His first moving pictures were taken in his father-in-law's garden at Roundhay. They were at 12 frames a second and were followed later in 1888 by better ones taken of the bridge at 20 frames a second.

One of his colleagues wrote: "It was as if you were on the bridge yourself. I could even see the smoke coming out of a man's pipe who was lounging on the bridge."

As in all the best movies, the Le Prince story ends with a dramatic twist. The inventor simply disappeared off the face of the earth while in France on patent business. His brother helped him with luggage as he boarded a train for Paris on September 16, 1890 - and that was the last seen of him.

THERE'S another story that, beyond the city itself, gets little of the attention that is being given to Leeds by astonished London journalists who hail it as the hub of the "cool North".

Alongside the plaque about Louis Le Prince is another which, given the often seedy direction which the cinema he pioneered has taken, represents a nice irony. In the same building, in 1847, campaigners against the demon drink met to form the Band of Hope movement. The name itself was suggested by a fervent Leeds temperance worker, the Rev Jabez Tunnicliffe.

He was one of 22 children of a Wolverhampton shoemaker and had gained a reputation for high principles and matching oratory since coming to Leeds in 1842. At that inaugural meeting, he moved his Quaker friends by telling them how addiction to drink had killed a once-respectable and pious young family man.

Jabez waved a sheet carrying the words of a popular melody: "Come all ye children, sing a song ... the Band of Hope shall be our name, the Temperance star our guide".

That was the inspiration behind the great sign-the-pledge campaign which, at its peak, gave the Band of Hope 1m members throughout the country.