Buslingthorpe is an area of

Leeds Leeds () is a city and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds district in West Yorkshire, England. It is built around the River Aire and is in the eastern foothills of the Pennines. It is also the third-largest settlement (by populati ...

West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a metropolitan and ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and Humber Region of England. It is an inland and upland county having eastward-draining valleys while taking in the moors of the Pennines. West Yorkshire came into exi ...

England England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Wales to its west and Scotland to its north. The Irish Sea lies northwest and the Celtic Sea to the southwest. It is separated from continental Europe b ...

. It is about one mile north of the city centre and currently falls within the Hyde Park and Woodhouse ward of the City of Leeds Council. Much of the housing in the area was demolished by

slum clearance Slum clearance, slum eviction or slum removal is an urban renewal strategy used to transform low income settlements with poor reputation into another type of development or housing. This has long been a strategy for redeveloping urban communities; ...

in the 1950s.

Etymology

The name of Buslingthorpe is first attested in 1258 as ''Buselingtorpe''. It is possible that the place borrowed its name from Buslingthorpe in

Lincolnshire Lincolnshire (abbreviated Lincs.) is a county in the East Midlands of England, with a long coastline on the North Sea to the east. It borders Norfolk to the south-east, Cambridgeshire to the south, Rutland to the south-west, Leicestershire ...

, but thought more likely that the two names were coined independently, from the

Old French Old French (, , ; Modern French: ) was the language spoken in most of the northern half of France from approximately the 8th to the 14th centuries. Rather than a unified language, Old French was a linkage of Romance dialects, mutually intelligib ...

personal name ''Buselin'' and the word ''thorpe'' ('secondary settlement, outlying farmstead', itself borrowed into English from

Old Norse Old Norse, Old Nordic, or Old Scandinavian, is a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants of Scandinavia and t ...

''þorp''). Thus the name ''Buslingthorpe'' originally meant 'Buselin's farmstead'. A writer in ''

Notes and Queries ''Notes and Queries'', also styled ''Notes & Queries'', is a long-running quarterly scholarly journal that publishes short articles related to " English language and literature, lexicography, history, and scholarly antiquarianism".From the inne ...

'' in 1932 noted that Buslingthorpe (shared with the Lincolnshire Buslingthorpe and

Buckfastleigh Buckfastleigh is a market town and civil parish in Devon, England situated beside the Devon Expressway ( A38) at the edge of the Dartmoor National Park. It is part of Teignbridge and, for ecclesiastical purposes, lies within the Totnes Deanery ...

Devon Devon ( , historically known as Devonshire , ) is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South West England. The most populous settlement in Devon is the city of Plymouth, followed by Devon's county town, the city of Exeter. Devon is ...

) contains 13 different letters, exactly half the alphabet, none repeated and with no hyphenation. The writer wondered if it was unique. The same question was raised earlier in Strand Magazine in 1921. In 2007

David Crystal David Crystal, (born 6 July 1941) is a British linguist, academic, and prolific author best known for his works on linguistics and the English language. Family Crystal was born in Lisburn, Northern Ireland, on 6 July 1941 after his mother had ...

noted that Bricklehampton surpasses this with 14 unique letters. Buslingthorpe's recreation ground was named Norma Hutchinson Park in 2009 to commemorate

Jamaica Jamaica (; ) is an island country situated in the Caribbean Sea. Spanning in area, it is the third-largest island of the Greater Antilles and the Caribbean (after Cuba and Hispaniola). Jamaica lies about south of Cuba, and west of His ...

n-born councillor Norma Hutchinson who died in 2004.

History

Buslingthorpe was an ecclesiastical parish from 1849 to 1955. Between 1870 and 1872, it was a chapelry in the parish of Leeds, with a population of 4,548 living in 998 houses. The Church of St Michael was built in 1852–1854 on Buslingthorpe Lane and demolished in the late 1950s or early 1960s. The architect was O. W. Burleigh, of Leeds.

References

External links

* Places in Leeds {{WestYorkshire-geo-stub