Grace Guide provides a fantastic resource of such information. It is a free-content not-for-profit project which has been collating and publishing information extracted and collated from a wide range of original source material covering UK industrial history.
As I type it contains 112,540 pages of information and 156,678 images on early companies, their products and the people who designed and built them.
http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Main_Page
For Leeds well feast yourselves here:
http://www.gracesguide.co.uk/Category:Town_-_Leeds
Enjoy
