The Leeds Arts Club was founded in 1903 by the Leeds primary school teacher Alfred Orage and Holbrook Jackson, a lace merchant and freelance journalist, and was one of the most advanced centres for modernist thinking, radical thought and experimental art in Britain in the pre-First World War period. History 1903–1906 Orage and his friends had made a number of attempts to found a forward thinking arts organisation in the city of Leeds, then an important manufacturing city. The Leeds Arts Club, set up in 1903, was an organisation that mixed radical socialist and anarchist politics with the philosophy of Friedrich Nietzsche, Suffragette Feminism, the spiritualism of the Theosophical Society and modernist art and poetry. It had close associations with the Independent Labour Party, the co-operative movement and the early Fabian Society. At its weekly meetings, members discussed the connections between art, spiritualism, philosophy and politics. The guiding ethos was a kind of existential experimenting dictated by aesthetic concerns where nothing was banned from a moral perspective. The Club met in rooms on the first floor of Leeds Permanent Building Society on the corner of Park Lane, now Headrow, and Calverley Street. Members included a large number of teachers, many of them women, journalists, architects, artists, photographers, typesetters, printers, clergymen and a few university lecturers. Orage actively encouraged women members, such as the suffragette and radical editor Mary Gawthorpe, to participate in debates. Gawthorpe describes in her autobiography speakers such as Beatrice Farr, and how the debates led her to appreciate women's experience, such as her friend Ethel Snowden, as well as pointing out the role of Alfred's wife Jean Orage, a textile artist, in challenging Orage to develop his theories and ideas. The pioneer socialist and feminist campaigner, novelist and journalist, Isabella Ford was one of the first supporters of the Club, served as an early committee member and lectured there on 'Women and the State' in 1905, returning to give a lecture in 1907 on 'Women's place in future progress' in the midst of her local and national work on women's suffrage. Members like Tom Heron, father of Patrick Heron, set up enlightened cooperative businesses, he later set up Cresta Silks following Guild Socialism ideas. The painter William Rothenstein and his brother Charles championed French Impressionist painting, lending examples to exhibitions held at the Club. 1906–1911 In 1906 Orage and Jackson left Leeds and moved to London to