Bradford Tourist Links

A select treasury of links for Bradford,West Yorkshire, and Northern England

"Bradford is great but nobody knows it." Pip Bell 1947 - 1997,artist, decorator of pottery and porcelain at Saltaire.
"I live in Bradford because of the multi-cultural atmosphere" Susan O'Connor, faedog player, samba-playing street musician, cajun dancer, biker, traveller,netsurfer, educationalist, Deputy Headteacher of Woodroyd Middle School, West Bowling and, in her youth, a champion horsewoman.
born 7th March1964, died, near Laneshaw Bridge,Lancs 14th September 1996
It is to the memory of these two Bradfordians that these pages are dedicated..

Bradford is slightly nearer to the Lancashire coast than to that of Yorkshire but the need to cross the Pennines to the west means that in terms of travel time the city is in the centre of the North of England.
Consider these distances: If you draw a circle of 10 miles radius centred on Saltaire it includes the Brontë village of Haworth and birthplace village of Thornton much of the 'Shirley' country of Spenborough,Halifax in its spectacular setting amongst the hills,the Victorian Spa town of Ilkley set at the foot of its world famous moor and the 'future world city'of Leeds.


Now extend the circle to 25 miles and that takes in the rest of the Shirley country, the medieval town of Wakefield with its bridge-chapel and the ruins of Sandal castle, Pontefract where Richard II was murdered and where a church still stands ruined from the Civil War siege, the luxurious shopping centre of Harrogate, Ripon with its medieval Cathedral built over St Wilfred's dark-age crypt, the World-heritage site of Studley Royal gardens and the ruins of Fountains Abbey, the scenery of Wharfedale, the mediaeval market town of Skipton guarded by the Castle of the Cliffords, the classic limestone uplands of Craven, the Pendle witch country, Burnley with its early 19th century mills, Calderdale, the Summer-Wine country around Holmfirth and the Dark Peak of Derbyshire


50 miles brings in York with its 2000 years of history, where 2 Roman emperors died and where Constantine the Great was proclaimed, Coxwold where Lawrence Sterne wrote 'Tristram Shandy', the western part of the North York Moors including the ruins of Rievaulx and Byland abbeys, and the rare Carthusian priory of Mount Grace; in the Pennines are included Wensleydale ,Swaledale and the spectacular Howgill Fells, Leighton Moss, surely the best bird reserve in the country, the resorts of the Lancashire coast: Morecambe once called the English Naples because of its setting on Morecambe Bay and its views of the High Lakeland fells, vibrant Blackpool, and the more refined Southport, Manchester the world's first great Industrial city and the rest of the Peak District


75 miles includes the whole of the Yorkshire coast from Spurn Point to Cleveland , including Whitby, the whole of County Durham, land of the Prince Bishops, the city of Newcastle upon Tyne, the North Pennine wilderness, the southern and eastern parts of the Lake District, including Windermere, Langdale and Wordsworth's Grasmere, the city of Liverpool, the Clwydian hills of North Wales, the rest of the Peak District, Sherwood Forest, and the city of Lincoln

Add only another 50 miles and within 125 miles of Saltaire you have Northumberland, the Scottish borders, the rest of the Lake District, Snowdonia, Mid-Wales and the Marches the West and East Midlands.


There are two International airports within the central area - Leeds-Bradford, and Manchester, fast train services on the east-coast line from London and trains from the European ferry port of Hull, in addition the area is served by the M1 motorway from London and the motorway-standard A1 Great North Rd and the M62 from Hull or from the M5 -M6 west coast corridor


These tourist links are arranged so that you can plan your visit to the area:

On this page you will find links to Bradford and the area within 10 miles of Saltaire
There will be two further pages in which will be classified according the scheme outlined above; one will take will take in those sites north of an east-west line of Humber - M62 -Mersey - Wirral the other those to the south of that line.

Accommodation links
Accommodation from Bradford-net
and their Hotels page


"(J.B.)Priestley's Bradford.......was a mill town full of belching chimneys and soot but the city I travel is full of grace. A barbaric town planner in the early sixties razed much of its late Victorian architecture and replaced it with jerry-built crap, but enough survives to convey a sense of former glories.......The city still has a swagger, a sense of pomp and a mighty weight of stone." Nick Cohn in Yes We Have No(1999)

Bradford was a medieval village which became a relatively prosperous Yorkshire market town and then in a few decades exploded as Worstedopolis where the economies of whole countries could be made or unmade on the floor of the Wool Exchange in Market St.
In a side valley off Airedale,linked to the rest of the world only by branch railway lines it was decidedly provincial and yet as J.B.Priestley put it :

There is nothing that can be spun or woven that does not come to Bradford...............These wools and hairs will be sorted, scoured, combed, the long strands forming Tops, the short Noils, and these Tops and Noils, if they are not used locally, may be exported all over the place, from Finland to Spain. What they will end as, God only knows. Their adventures are terrific.English Journey(1934)

After 150 years of first dominating and then being central to the world wool textile trade it all ended in the early 1980s: the wagons that used to carry huge cuboid packs of wool around the city vanished as did the wisps of escaped fibre that you could pick up in the gutter; for a while different wagons carried machinery away to be scrapped and then they too ceased to run. The smoke cleared and Bradford was left with one of the most striking sites for a city in the country. The centre is at a right-angled bend in Bradford dale where old roads crossed the beck by the broad ford from which the city gets its name. No one knows exactly how old these roads are but one, that which comes down Bridge St and then climbs Ivegate to Westgate may be Roman and is probably much older.
At both ends of the Dale the open Moorland can be seen against the sky, fields are green within a couple of miles of the City centre
As an introduction to Bradford see the Eagle Intermedia Bronte Country site
Most of the city centre was rebuilt by the Victorians although some of the medieval property boundaries can still be traced on the south side of Kirkgate. Bradford Council has produced this guide to city centre buildings: Bradford City Centre Tourist Trail
and there are other Bradford buildings pictured here as well as a Bradford Timeline

Bradford Town Hall built as a civic showpiece in the mid-19thC feature statues of all the Kings and Queens of England/Gt Britain; unusually it includes of a figure of the Lord Protector Oliver Cromwell

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Just outside the city centre in East Bowling is Bolling Hall. Originly a Medieval tower house( the Tower in which the entrance is situated dates from the mid-15th century) overlooking the valley of Bowling Beck it has been added-to several times in its history so that it is a curious architectural melange of the Middle Ages, the Elizabethan and of the Georgian periods.Bolling Hall



Originally built by the de Bolling family it has been adopted by their descendants in the United StatesDescription of Bolling Hall (from the Bolling family website)
and Photographs of Bolling Hall (ditto)
It also has a curious and rather unconvincing ghost story The Ghost of Bolling Hall or "Pity poor Bradford"( again ditto). Unconvincing because Bradford was sacked after the civil-war siege, although the inhabitants were not slaughtered, and the story is a more decorous version of Sir Walter Scott's Woodstock

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Bradford did not only mean the wool industry - Bowling and Low Moor Iron Works were world famous - there was coal mining and the getting of iron ore and fireclay and there still is quarrying for the famous York Stone within short distance of the city centre. Finally, in the 20th century there was engineering

Bradford's manufacturing and transport history is preserved in the Industrial Museum while there are displays of some of the extractive industries at Cliffe Castle in the nearby town of Keighley.
As the centre of worsted production Bradford needed a dyeing industry and Ripley's Dye-works in Bowling was the largest in the world. A result of this heritage is the unique Colour Museum.

As Bradford manufacturers became rich they spent some of their money on works of art and in 1904, as a gift from the greatest survivor of the heroic age, Samuel Cunliffe Lister, by then Lord Masham, the city opened a spectacularly baroque art gallery in Lister Park, Manningham. This is Cartwright Hall - diplomatically named after Edmund Cartwright for his invention of the power loom rather than after some of the more local inventors such as the donor himself.
The permanent collection includes paintings by Guido Reni,Vasari(attrib), James Ward( a sketch for the large Goredale Scar in the London Tate Gallery), Ford Madox Brown (Wycliffe reading his translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt) and many Victorian and Edwardian paintings which must have appealed to the woolmen of the time.
Some of these worsted kings had taste however as is shown by H. H. La Thangue's The Connoisseur - a portrait of Abraham Mitchell amidst his art collection in his mansion on Rooley Lane to the south of the town. The squat Yorkshireman sits with his back to his family considering a painting magnifying glass in hand. Only a moment in family life no doubt but it is one of those portraits which takes you into a entire system of relationships - with society as whole and with his family by the well judged orchestraion of the elements - enclosure and space - which make it up.

Finally there is an example of how decentralisation works. The National Museum of Photography,Film and Televison NMPFT - Welcome. This outstation of the Science Musem is one of the most successful museums in the country. Now re-opened after a refurbishment lasting one year it provides an introduction the worlds of still- and moving-pictures.


Asian angle
Bradford has always been a city of immigrants whether it was from Addingham like Ellis Cunliffe Lister, Eldwick like John Nicholson, Harden like the Horton Chartist, John Jackson, Wakefield like Daniel and Titus Salt or Haworth like that curiously unsuccesful portrait-painter and future station master Branwell Brontë; and they came from farther afield like the Trades Union leader and Chartist George White from Ireland or Georg Weerth from Detmold in Westphalia. All these came in the early 19th century because an expanding economy attracts people to it.

In this century many Poles , Ukranians and Serbs came as displaced persons after the 2nd World War and from the 1950s onwards Kashmiris, Punjabis and Bengalis came to work in the mills.
This South Asian presence has given the city its distinctive atmosphere and in the last few years there has been a flowering of Asian business intiatives .
One result of this development is that Bradford has become a centre for some of the best South Asian food in the country
Tourism and Leisure--Asian Food
Bhuna Beat - The Essential Curry Guide to Bradford


The Brontës
The Brontes

Haworth Parsonage

Mitsuharu Matsuoka at the University of Nagoya, Japan has collected together many Bronte websites The Bronte Sisters Web (Mitsu Matsuoka)

Some new pictures of Haworth can be found on West Yorkshire Photographs


The leading literary shrine in Yorkshire since the 19th Century Haworth in the hills to south of Keighley and linked to it by the preserved Keighley and Worth Valley Railway (KWVR Home Page), does not need an introduction but the birthplace village of Thornton does. It is about 4 miles to the west of Bradford near the head of the Dale. It is a place of narrow lanes and distant views stretching from Ingleborough to past Selby with two remarkable Grade 1 listed buildings (the 17th century house, with original glazing, and the barn, at Upper Headley on the south-side of the valley)

Upper Headley

The neighbourhood is desolate and wild; great tracts of bleak land,enclosed by stone dykes sweeping up Clayton Heights. - Elizabeth Gaskell on Thornton

and, a prominent landmark, the late-19th century church with a Morris and co east window. Opposite, on the other side of Thornton Rd (the 1826 turnpike), are the remains of t'owd Bell Chapel which the Rev. Patrick Brontë served as curate from 1815 to 1820.. This was built around the turn of the 17th century but there seem to have been churches here since the13th . In 1818 the Rev Brontë rebuilt the south wall to provide more light and placed the cupola, which still stands in the churchyard, on the roof. The font , in which Charlotte, Emily, Anne and Patrick Branwell were baptised has been transferred to the new church which also has a small display of reproduced documents relating to the family.
The Brontë Birthplace ".........until the spot is rescued from the "base uses" to which it is now put, and restored to something of its original semblance and dignity, any attempt to honour their memory....must be regarded as incomplete." William Scruton 1898
Now after many years of neglect and uncertainty the house has been bought by Barbara Whitehead, biographer of Charlotte Brontë's friend Ellen Nussey, who is restoring it. Details of opening times can be found here.
While the Eagle Intermedia pages provide more details of the village and its history Thornton and the Brontes

Some other pictures of Thornton from West Yorkshire Photographs


The Shirley Country
To the south-east of Bradford is Spenborough. Amongst the small towns which make it up are several with historical associations.
At Gomersal is the Red House Museum - once the home of Mary Taylor, novelist, colonial storekeeper and Charlotte Brontë's friend. Her father Joshua Taylor is said to have been the inspiration for Mr Yorke in Shirley
At Birstall is Oakwell Hall, at the eastern end of the Bronte Way long distance trail and said to be the original of Fieldhead,


Oakwell Hall

Also at Birstall is the grave of Ellen Nussey who acted as one of Charlotte Brontë's bridesmaids, and, nearby is the birthplace of Joseph Priestley who first prepared oxygen without knowing what it was that he had discovered.( that honour must go to Lavoisier) and was later a political emigré to the United States.
Near Cleckheaton is Rawfolds the site , for there is nothing now to see, of the Mill attacked by the Luddites and just beyond there near Liversedge crossroads Healds Hall once home to the Rev Hammond Robison energetic representative of Anglicanism in this non-conformist valley, whose church schools can be found in almost every town. and who has his equivalent in Shirley
To the west is Hartshead Moor where the Rev Patrick Brontë was curate before moving to Thornton. Nearby there is the stump of an Anglian cross



and from Freakfield Lane (parking difficult) a view of the most famous bowshot in England; for below lies the very private Jacobean mansion of Kirklees Hall built on the site of the Priory where - it is said Robin Hood died after picking his grave site by firing an arrow from a window. It was a mighty achievement for a dying man for the traditional Robin Hood's Grave lies one mile away in the grounds; and is - most definitely - not open to the public
Cleckheaton Folk Festival Map (with links other pages about the 1999 Folk Festival)

In the 18th Century the West Riding was a centre of both religious non-conformity and of the evangelical revival. One result of this is a number of Moravian settlements in the area. These were in effect mission stations. There is one at Lower Wyke south of Bradford but the most important and the most impressive is at Fulneck near Pudsey between Bradford and Leeds.



It consists of a range of buildings along the hillside and it is interesting to compare it with Saltaire as an example of town planning

Pudsey Civic Society homepage

Gee's Historic Pudsey Page - Index

Morley - the birthplace of two famous Liberals: Sir Titus Salt and H.H.Asquith.Set on a hill overlooking Leeds Gee's Historic Morley Page - Index

Leeds has been described as a future world city in that it has succesfully revived its economy on the basis of those sectors which will be important in the next century. It was also described - by Tara Parker Tomkinson - as 'Like London only smaller' and there is certainly truth in that statement; it is a 24-hour lively,modern city with an international reputation but with a history which goes back to the Dark Ages.

Visit Virtual Leeds -

LEEDS CITY COUNCIL - Tourism - Leeds International Piano Competition
Leodis-Leeds
It is possible that the parish church in the markets area is on the site of the monastery in a wood in Elmet mentioned by Bede.(although there are other contenders).The great battle of Winwaed was fought near Seacroft to the North east of the city Barwick in Elmet may have been the capital of Elmet and it has been suggested that the elaborate maypole in the village is a descendant of the royal standard raised there..
To theNorthwest of the city is Kirkstall Abbey one of the most impressive of the ruined monastic buildings of Yorkshire


To the north of the city is Adel Church. It is small but it is also one of the finest Norman churches in the country


Adel Church doorway


At Temple Newsam to the east an Elizabethan mansion is the home of the City's old master collection while Armley Mills , to the west is home to the Industrial Museum including a most authentic reproduction of the main roadway of a coal mine. On the hillside above Armley Mills is Gotts Park with the remains of Humphrey Repton's landscaping done for the great Leeds manufacturer and art patron Benjamin Gott

The Royal Armouries Museum is another example of de-centralization from London. It contains displays showing the development of arms and armour over the centuries. Its collection includes the tournament armour made for Henry VIII and two stuffed elephants, one wearing the only complete set of elephant armour in the UK. The tower of steel display is one of the most effective pieces of public sculpture in West Yorkshire - the well of the main staircase being hung with pieces of armour


Harewood House to the North of Leeds on the road to Harrogate. Designed by John Carr of York- in collaboration with the young Robert Adam.(Carr is the most important Yorkshire architect of the 18th Century.and, incidently,his design for a house in Halifax was copied by the builder of Titus Salt's Crow Nest. )
There is one further point to be made about Harewood and that concerns the origins of all this beauty, and it is beauty. The Lascelles were, in the parlance of the time West Indians, that is their money came from the West Indies - all this was raised on the backs of African slaves. That is no reason not to enjoy what is there now but it should give us pause for thought.


Rock Art
Just to the north of Saltaire, on the sides of Baildon Moor, for miles across Rombalds Moor and in other places in the area such as the Washburn Valley beyond Otley natural boulders are decorated with cup-and-ring decorations which probably date to the Late Neolithic or Bronze Age.Petroglyph - index. includes images of some of these. (Although Graeme Chappel, whose site it is, tells me that it is unlikely that he will be able to add pictures of the Baildon Moor stones in the near future.)
Rombalds Moor itself is worth exploring although having been popular with tourists for so long it does not have quite the sense of isolation which you can find elsewhere. There is car access to the very top from the south by way of the old Keighley to Ilkley road to Whetstone Gate (This road is not open to cars all the way across) The northern slopes are accesable from the Cow and Calf Hotel.


Cow and Calf Rocks above Ilkley
This latter can be approached from Saltaire via Baildon and Burley Woodhead (recommended although narrow and twisting)but if you go this way you miss seeing Harry Ramsden's - the world's most famous fish and chip restaurant at White Cross.


Thomas Chippendale
memorial, Otley


Otley was the birthplace of furniture designer Thomas Chippendale and has associations with J.M.W.Turner whose friend and patron Walter Fawkes owned Farnley Hall to the north of the town


Ilkley

The Victorian Spa town of Ilkley stands on the River Wharfe at the foot of the moors. In the centre is the medieval Manor house which stands on the remains of the Roman fort. This latter may - or may not - have been the Olicana listed the late-classical itineraries. Place-name experts doubt that the one name could turn into the other and there the matter should rest until someone digs up a sign reading Hic est Olicanæ - here or at the other contender Elslack . But the inhabitants of this town have embraced the name and that is far too late to change

Anglian crosses at Ilkley Church

The Swastika Stone above Ilkley

The Yorkshire Dales ilkley
The Ilkley Pages
Welcome to your virtual guide to Ilkley

Cottingley or what people really want
The , now suburban and, even then, hardly isolated, village of Cottingley is world famous for a series of photographs taken by two young girls showing them in the company of fairies.
In a letter, written in 1983 and first partly published in the Bradford Telegraph and Argus (15 January 1998), Elsie Wright spoke of "the pickle" she and her cousin Frances Griffiths had got themselves into with their fairy photographs. The pictures had been taken up, contraversially,by Conan Doyle in a magazine article as proof of the existence of a reality co-existent with this one.and the girls felt under great adult pressure. Fifteen year-old Elsie's father had told her that she had to explain how the photos had been taken but Frances, aged eight, "begged me not to tell as the Strand Magazine had brought her so much teasing at school, and I was also feeling sad for Conan Doyle, we had read in the newspapers of his getting some jarring comments.....he had recently lost his son in the(First World)war and the poor man was probably trying to comfort himself with unworldly things."(E.Wright ALS to Geoffrey Crawley offered for sale at Christies 1998)
There is something touchingly human about the whole affair: the girls imagination fed by that of some of the greatest book illustrators there have ever been, their use of new(ish) technology (a cheap camera) a childish joke (refusing to admit that the fairies were not real),the intense need of so many people to believe in them and girls' desire not to hurt the feelings of persons so much older and more important than themselves.. So perhaps Cottingley should be a tourist destination: a place to ponder the fallibility of human psychology and desire.
Donald Simanek dicusses the case in this essay from his superb collection of science links: Arthur Conan Doyle, Spiritualism, and Fairies

Cottingley is just over one mile west of Saltaire and just south of the A650. There is very little to see as the Beck is on private land. But for your guidance: Cottingley Beck rises in a patch of boggy ground beside Smithfield House on Allerton Rd (the ridge to the south-east) and flows down under Sandy Lane crossroads on Haworth Rd (the old Bradford - Colne turnpike). At Sandy Lane Bridge it enters an area of deep Glacial Till (boulder clay as it used to be called) which marks the bed of Lake Harden (caused by the melt water from the Aire Glacier at the end of the last Ice Age); into this the beck has dug a narrow gorge twenty to thirty feet deep. The gorge is crossed by a road bridge at Lee Lane and by the conduit from the Braford reservoirs in Nidderdale to the waterworks at Chellow Heights. It is below the latter that the photographs were taken. It is not possible to enter the gorge but in winter a view across it can be gained from the top-deck of the 620 bus (Bradford to Cottingley,Bradford to Bingley or Bradford to Eldwick depending on the day or time of day [warning there are other services to these destinations so it must be the 620 from Bradford Interchange stand A22]
The fields alongside the Beck are shortly to be built on . This will result, so we are promised, in public access to the gorge for the first time; it will also inconvenience a number of small flying creatures - the swallows and martins which feed here before the autumn migration.
(Personal note of Fortean coincidence: I was sitting in a bus at Cottingley terminus when I first read of the famous Alien Autopsy film. (db))


Halifax is set spectacularly amongst the Pennines.(if you are travelling from Bradford then approach through Queensbury for the best views.[576 bus from Bradford Interchange])The town is associated with the names of three great writers: 17th century stylist Sir Thomas Browne, Lawrence Sterne, who was at school at Hipperholme and whose uncle lived at Copley, near where Edward Ackroyd later built his first industrial village, and Dorothy Wordsworth who,as an orphaned girl, lived here with relatives .

The Puritan influence was great in the manufacturing districts of the West Riding .The undecorated glass in Halifax Church demonstrates this fact.

The town was prosperous in the 18th century - just how prosperous can be seen by visiting the Piece Hall a vast open square enclosed by colonaded walkways on which the woolmen had their shops. These latter have been converted into retail units let to craft workers and specialist dealers of one sort or another.
In the Nineteenth Century the town faded in comparison with Bradford yet it built the spectacular (and faintly Russian) Town Hall by Sir Charles Barry, Frank Crossley's(Sir Francis Crossley,MP)People's Park and the Dean Clough carpet mills These were once the largest factory in the world and now have developed by Sir Ernest Hall ( a professional standard pianist as well as a Yorkshire businessman) as a business centre with theatre, art gallery and restaurant attatched.
(Jonathan Silver worked with Hall for some time before he bought Salts Mill at Saltaire)
Eureka! The Museum for Children
LEEDS CITY COUNCIL - Tourism - Halifax and Calder Valley
LEEDS CITY COUNCIL - Tourism - Halifax and Calder Valley

Halifax Town Hall

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The next of these tourist pages will contain Links to tourist sites to the north of a line from the Humber to the Dee Estuary

Main Page
(with constantly updated news of Saltaire)
*
* Getting to Saltaire* Pictures of Saltaire * Books at Saltaire* Tourist information
* Victoria Hall - Saltaire's unique international and community venue
* Events at Victoria Hall August, September, October 1999*
History of Salt and his times to 1853*History 1853 -1876*Books about Saltaire
*a walk along Albert Terrace * Maps of Saltaire Region
* The Marble Likeness of their Liberal Master *Links
Northern Tourist Links(Bradford)