Leeds Tiger cleaned for future museum visitors

By Hiyastar Culture Desk

Published in 2026, based on source material from Leeds City Council.

The Leeds Tiger has spent generations watching over the entrance to Leeds City Museum, a striped landmark familiar to visitors long before they step deeper into the galleries. Now the famous Bengal tiger, one of the museum’s best-known natural history specimens, has been given the careful attention needed to keep a 160-year-old exhibit on public display.

The work took place in the museum’s Life on Earth Gallery, where curators checked the huge taxidermy mount for dust, deterioration and tiny pests that can damage historic specimens. For an animal once described as “unequalled in Europe”, the care is necessarily slow, close and precise.

A delicate clean for a Leeds landmark

Curators Clare Brown and Sarah Burhouse were among the specialists carrying out the checks, examining the Leeds Tiger and other rare specimens for changes in condition. Historic taxidermy can suffer as skins dry out, shrink and begin to crack, while pests and dust can cause further damage if they go unnoticed.

The tiger is thought to be one of the biggest taxidermy mounts of its kind anywhere in the world. Its size gives it much of its visual power, but also makes conservation work exacting: every surface, join and vulnerable area has to be monitored without harming the original material.

Brown, Leeds Museums and Galleries’ curator of natural sciences, said much of the collection dates from the late 19th and early 20th centuries. The techniques and materials used to preserve such mounts mean they need periodic checks to make sure rare specimens remain stable.

The colonial story behind the Leeds Tiger

The tiger’s history reaches back to 1860, when it was shot and killed in the foothills of the Himalayas by Major-General Sir Charles Reid. Reid later claimed it was the largest tiger he had ever seen, measuring more than 12 feet in length.

The animal’s pelt was shipped to Britain as a trophy and displayed in the Indian court of the London International Exhibition. In 1862, wealthy Leeds industrialist William Gott bought it and commissioned noted taxidermist Edwin Henry Ward to mount the skin.

Gott then presented the finished specimen for display by the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society. At the time, it was celebrated for its scale and craftsmanship, but its story now sits within a wider account of colonial-era collecting and the heavy toll of hunting on tiger populations in India.

The museum’s presentation of the Leeds Tiger does not separate the object from that context. The source material notes that hunting tigers was a popular pastime among British soldiers serving in colonial India and contributed to a catastrophic decline in local populations.

Rare birds, a panda and human impact

The conservation work was not limited to the tiger. Museum staff also cleaned the delicate tail feathers of an exceptionally rare pair of Huia, an extinct bird species from New Zealand.

Huia held sacred significance for Māori people, and their tail feathers were traditionally worn by people of high status and power. In 1901, the Duke of York was given a Huia feather during a visit to New Zealand, and the resulting fashion demand helped drive intense hunting. The species was extinct six years later.

Another specimen checked during the work was Grandma, the giant panda captured near Weizhou village in central China. She became the first live giant panda to arrive in the UK in 1938, but died two weeks later after contracting double pneumonia.

For Brown, these objects are connected by more than their place in the gallery. She said the animals came from different parts of the world and very different habitats, but their lives and deaths were profoundly affected by human intervention.

What visitors see in the Life on Earth Gallery

The Life on Earth Gallery holds a wide natural science collection, including a polar bear, turtle, sea lion, Tibetan yak and the skeleton of a huge bluefin tuna. The specimens are displayed alongside material on the climate emergency and the histories of individual objects in the museum’s care.

That setting gives the Leeds Tiger a different role from the one it had in the 19th century. It remains a striking object, but it also helps tell a story about collecting, empire, extinction, conservation and how museums preserve difficult inheritances for public learning.

Councillor Salma Arif, Leeds City Council’s executive member for economy, said the Leeds collection contains artefacts, specimens and stories that can be seen nowhere else in the world. She credited the behind-the-scenes museum teams with preserving the collection so it can continue to engage future visitors.

Leeds City Museum operates as a Give What You Can museum. Visitors are invited to donate if they are able, with Tap to Give points available on arrival and during visits, alongside contactless, Chip and Pin, cash and coin options.

Source: Leeds City Council