The Liberal Party ran Leeds for most of the nineteenth century: the council from 1835 to 1895, most parliamentary seats until the city was split into five in 1885. Their club, though, rented rooms in the Royal Insurance building on Park Row. In 1890 they built this instead, on the newly laid-out Quebec Street, with room for 1,600 members at three guineas a year. Sir James Kitson laid the foundation stone on 12 March 1890; the Marquis of Ripon opened the door with a presented key on 20 February 1891, about a hundred members having walked over from Park Row for the occasion. The architects, Chorley & Connon, were club members and Liberals themselves. Within a generation the party was gone — last council majority 1906, last Leeds Liberal MP 1922 — and by the 1920s the building was being let as offices.