Quiet streets

Haworth was busier than it looks from my photos (though nothing like as busy as it would be on a summer's day). We had an early lunch and I think most of the visitors were in the many cafés, tea shops and pubs when we wandered down Main Street. I'm always fascinated by the variety of architectural styles, some Georgian, some Victorian. Houses and shops have been squeezed in between the older weavers cottages and have seen many alterations over the years. When the Brontës lived in Haworth, the village must have been a building site, as homes were built to accommodate the workers needed at the expanding textile mills in the valley. 

Sadly, it was a notoriously unhealthy place, due to a poor water supply and rudimentary sanitation, not to mention the pollution from industry and even seepage from the churchyard graves, which are above the village. In the mid 1800s, infant mortality was horrifying. 41% of children died before they were six years old and the average life expectancy of an adult was 44. (Indeed, all of Patrick Brontë's six children, including the literary sisters, died before they were 40.) It's sobering to walk the streets nowadays and reflect on that. 

The building in the photo above, at the corner of Changegate and West Lane, was once the Yorkshire Penny Bank and later the Tourist Information Centre. Even touristy Haworth has lost its Information Centre, thanks to Council budget cuts. 

There are numerous small alleys and courts like the one below, reflecting how the village grew rapidly and piecemeal in the 18th and 19th century.  Some of these cottages belonged to handloom weavers and have long rows of mullioned windows on the top floor at the front, which allowed light into the weaving rooms. 

 

Defying Expectations

The writing tablet (above) was Charlotte Brontë's, still filled with her bits and bobs, including the quill pens with which the literary sisters wrote their novels and stories.

The Brontë Society has amassed a wealth of other Brontë memorabilia, including many fragments of poems, drawings and manuscripts related to the family. They show some of it in the Parsonage Museum, linked to exhibitions focussed on different aspects of the sisters lives and work. The manuscript below is a poem written by Emily Brontë (1818-1848). The one on the right is dated January 12th 1839, when she was about 20.  Those quill pens were messy! The sisters all had very tiny writing, practised most famously in the miniature books they wrote to play with as children, and which kick-started their imaginative story telling. 

Below is a sampler embroidered by Emily, dated March 1st 1829, the embroidery as tiny and meticulous as her writing. 

There is currently an exhibition 'Defying Expectations: Inside Charlotte Brontë's Wardrobe'. It springs from research carried out recently by Dr Eleanor Houghton into clothing samples held by the Brontë Society, which have been proven to be Charlotte's. It suggests that, contrary to what you might expect, she had some colourful and quite fashionable clothing, actively participating in the fast changing mid-Victorian society in which she lived a relatively comfortable, though not wealthy, lower middle-class existence. She and her sisters did defy expectations, getting novels published (under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell) and often in their letters and writings railing against the dull monotony of female life, and struggling with the jobs as teachers and governesses that they needed to find to supplement the family income. Despite the fine clothes, it was a hard life in terms of health and wellbeing. All of the siblings died relatively young. Patrick, their father, outlived them all. 

The exhibition features this striped and embellished evening dress, sketched below. 

This day dress was passed on to another person and altered but it is known to have been Charlotte's. Such a pretty fabric. 

Mid-Victorian dresses had wide skirts over lots of petticoats and, later, over hoops to form the skirt shape. The scraps of fabric are surprisingly pretty, featuring flowers, stripes and paisley patterns. I was interested to note that analysis shows that the Brontës had some fabrics woven of alpaca and wool - most likely manufactured by Saltaire's own Sir Titus Salt, who discovered how to spin and incorporate alpaca wool into fine, lustrous cloth. 

I just love the bonnets too. This one was Charlotte's - a high quality straw made in Italy, lined with floral silk. So pretty - they should make a comeback!  

I liked this scrap of fine lace too, maybe part of a shawl. Shawls had an important role in a Victorian lady's wardrobe, providing warmth and/or decorative appeal.  The exhibition shows several beautiful versions that were owned by Charlotte. 

The Brontë Parsonage

Brontë pilgrims still wind their way from Haworth's church up the cobbled lane to the Parsonage. I imagine it looks not dissimilar to the street the Brontës would have walked. 

The building on the right (above) is the old schoolroom, built in 1832 by Patrick Brontë, a passionate social reformer who strongly believed in the power of education to transform lives. All of his children - Charlotte, Anne, Emily and Branwell - taught there at some stage and it was extended in later years. When Charlotte married Arthur Bell Nicholls in 1854, they held their wedding reception there, attended by 500 guests!  

I have cropped the photo above to make the Parsonage look like it did when the Brontës lived there. The gable wing on the right was added by a later resident. 

On the staircase inside, there is a copy of the famous painting of Anne, Emily and Charlotte by their brother Branwell, who subsequently painted over his own likeness in the centre. The original is in the National Portrait Gallery, having been discovered folded up on top of a wardrobe by the second wife of Charlotte's widower. 

The rooms in the Parsonage are still filled with furniture and effects, many of which actually belonged to the Brontës. The wallpapers are copies of fragments found in the rooms. The parlour, below, is where the sisters gathered in the evenings and wrote many of their poems and novels. 

Patrick Brontë's bedroom was where his son Branwell died, perhaps of TB but sadly exacerbated by the drink and opiates to which he was addicted. 

There's a rather lovely grandfather clock on the staircase landing. It is said that Patrick stopped every night on his way to bed and wound it up. 

The Brontë Parsonage Museum has a link to Saltaire, in that Sir James Roberts, managing director at Salts Mill after the Salts sold the mill, bought the Haworth house in 1928. He gave it to the Brontë Society, which had been set up to collect and preserve memorabilia related to the Brontës, after their deaths. It is still owned and managed by the Society to this day.

 

The Brontë church

St Michael and All Angels is Haworth's parish church and has, of course, a strong connection with the literary Brontë family. The sisters' father, Patrick, was the incumbent here from 1820 to 1861, during which time the family resided at the adjacent Georgian Parsonage (below). It was here that Charlotte, Anne and Emily Brontë wrote their famous novels. The church was, in fact, largely rebuilt around 1880 so it is not exactly the church the family knew. All of the family (apart from Anne, who died and was buried in Scarborough) are interred in a vault under the church, now covered by a small memorial chapel. 

The graveyard is rather bleak, made dark by the huge trees around it. At this time of year a few of the graves are covered in snowdrops. 

The church is currently undergoing some restoration, though more money needs to be found to repair it and to clean and conserve the wall paintings, one of which can just be seen above the arch in the picture below. Despite it being a destination for tourists and Brontë fans, it seems few leave any donations.  

Below is a detail of the marble pulpit. 

The church and the Parsonage sit above the old part of Haworth. The church steps lead down into the village's central square at the top of Main Street. 

After the storms

We had a lull in the sequence of storms - wind, rain, snow and floods - that have plagued the UK over the past week or so. It's only temporary, I think, with more snow and wind on the way, but it has allowed the River Aire to sink back into its normal channel. Most of the flood water has receded too, apart from a rather large pool at one end of the park as you can see in the photo above. I think they may have to turn that into a lido swimming pool! It doesn't seem to be draining away very fast. 

The floodwater has moved downstream now to places like York and Tadcaster, which are badly affected. 

Elsewhere in the park there are signs of Spring. The crocuses look a bit battered but I'm sure they'll perk up in the sunshine. The river is still flowing fast and the weir looked lively. It hasn't dislodged the enormous tree trunk lying there though! That man from the Environment Agency will have to come back. 

 

Golf balls?

Here's an image I've picked out from last year that I didn't post at the time. This is Menwith Hill near Harrogate, as seen from the ridge near Timble, with Fewston Reservoir in the foreground.  Nominally an RAF base, it is in fact controlled by the US National Security Agency. Those golf balls are radomes, receiving satellite images and intercepting electronic communications for both military and commercial purposes, including the harvesting of data from emails and phone calls worldwide. Expanding from four radomes in the 1970s, there are now over 30 of them. It's described as the largest electronic monitoring station in the world. It's all very secretive and has attracted its fair share of peace marches and protests over the years. CND and others continue to protest. They say: 'The NSA and other US intelligence agencies represented at Menwith Hill are now capable of overseeing ‘real-time’ military operations, identifying low-visibility targets and coordinating special operations forces and remote control technologies like drones.' Not that anybody listens to the protests. I guess they're too busy listening to our global communications. (Probably doing overtime since Russia has started agitating in Ukraine!) Keeping us safe or being sinister... who can judge? 

Fashion and a Sense of Place

Update: flooding receding round here and didn't quite reach the Half Moon Café in the park, thankfully. Problems are now further downstream in places like York and Tadcaster.  So now, back to the Bankfield...

As befits a museum in the heart of West Yorkshire's textile heritage, Halifax's Bankfield Museum has a vast archive of textiles and fashion items. There is currently an exhibition called 'Belonging: Fashion & A Sense of Place', which links contemporary fashion with the culture, landscape and influences of West Yorkshire. It places historic garments alongside modern creations by a host of famous designers, as well as work by students at Leeds Arts University. The fashion world is one that rather passes me by (!) but it was all rather visually appealing and a feast of colour. 

The blurb alongside this creation (below) referenced something about mental health, I seem to recall. It does allow you to take your own huggy pillow everywhere (though some of us have built-in huggy pillows too!  😂 ) 

 

Wellies and your big coat needed

I'm interrupting the Bankfield museum series in order to be topical - topic: the weather! 

Climate change is well and truly with us. We've had three named storms in the space of a few days, bringing gale force winds, heavy rain and snow, so it's not surprising that by Sunday our rivers were suffering under the impact. Mid-afternoon on Sunday, although it was still raining, I ventured down to the park to gauge what was happening. 

As you can see above, the river had breached and was pouring into Roberts Park. It hadn't (yet) topped the opposite bank but the Boathouse Inn had its flood defences in place. Further down by the bowling greens the car park was under water.  That huge, pesky tree (see HERE) was still trapped above the weir - one wonders for how much longer with that force of water... The weir itself was hard to see apart from the turbulence, though the river level was (at that time) not up to the top of the wall by Salts Mill.   

It's always a vulnerable spot further upstream by Hirst Weir and the Rowing Club (below), as Lode Pit Beck joins the Aire here. The banking by the weir is quite low and the whole area quickly gets inundated. You can just see the handrail of what is normally the footbridge over the beck. I suppose to an extent it is designed to be like that; allowing flooding on this side relieves the pressure against the old mill on the other bank, which is now residential property. 

The footpath through the nature reserve was awash - but this is designated flood plain and the houses above are elevated, hopefully high enough to be safe. 

The power of the water was terrifying, but the river level was still well below the footbridge across the Aire, where I stood to take the picture below.  

At the time I was exploring, the flooding wasn't as bad as the record floods of 2015, and was similar to those after Storm Ciara in 2020, but the rain was still falling and there was much more water to come down from the higher reaches of the river in the Dales. In the hour I was out, the water level in the park had come much higher, creeping up towards the Half Moon Café. 

Classical puzzle

The Bankfield Museum in Halifax has a room - the Marble Gallery - full of statues and classical imagery. I was intrigued by this sculpture, a classical Greek mythology statue of a woman... a goddess perhaps, (whose foot you can just see). I didn't take too much notice of it really but happened to see at its base this cupid, apparently snogging another! (Or maybe doing CPR?) I rather liked it and took a quick snap just for fun. I still rather like it... but I now wish I'd taken more notice of the whole piece (not that it appeared to have any explanatory label). Because the second little person underneath doesn't appear to be a cupid, so I'm wondering if it is actually the story of Cupid and Psyche - and the woman standing is Venus? 

For a (rather hilarious) quick round-up of that story, please see HERE. 

Whether I'm right or wrong, I think I'm going to have to go back and take another look! 

Bankfield beauty

So what do you do on a wet and very windy Saturday? Well, dive into a local museum, of course. I'd been meaning to visit the Bankfield Museum in Halifax for a while, to see a specific exhibition there. It was such horrid weather that I ran straight from the car into the entrance lobby, without even stopping to take a photo of the museum itself, but there was plenty to enjoy inside (and from the windows - above).

The museum building was once the home of one of Halifax's most prominent mill owners, Edward Ackroyd (1810-1887), something of a similar figure to Saltaire's Sir Titus Salt, in that he had great concern for his workers' welfare and local conditions. He bought land around his mansion for a model village, Ackroydon, though the plan was never fully realised, and he enabled workers to buy their own houses through low cost mortgages. 

The Bankfield mansion, built in 1800, was extended and laid out in grandiose fashion whilst he lived there. By 1887, his worsted business was in decline and Edward himself was dying, so he sold the building to Halifax Corporation (he had no children) and it has been a museum and library ever since. 

It retains some of its grandest features. The entrance staircase is stunning and there are wonderful painted ceilings:

and many of the original encaustic tiled floors:

Some of the pieces inside belonged to Ackroyd but others have been brought in as part of collections and donations, particularly under the curatorship of Henry Ling Roth in the early 1900s.  

I'm always intrigued by the wonderful Italian 'veiled statues', popular in the 18th and 19th centuries. This one is by Bazzanti c1860 (and may be - but is probably not! - Ackroyd's wife Elizabeth). 

At the other end of the artistic scale, I equally enjoyed seeing the collection of old stone and glass bottles with local origins. 

I was there a good couple of hours and there was so much to take in and enjoy that a repeat visit wouldn't go amiss. 

By the way, for copyright reasons, I can't reproduce any of the paintings from the exhibition I went to see but it was by my favourite artist, Kate Lycett, who works out of her studio in nearby Hebden Bridge. Look HERE for examples of her distinctive work, all inspired by Yorkshire scenes. It was a stunning exhibition of new work she created during lockdown. My daughter bought me a copy of Kate's lovely book 'The Nightingale Project' for Christmas and it's a delight to look through. 

Lister Park statues

Like most of our public parks, Bradford's Lister Park has its fair share of statues dotted around. This one, set on an island in the (currently drained) boating lake is a recent addition, gifted to the park by the philanthropist Trevor Pears. It was made in Liverpool and is similar to the one that has stood in London's Kensington Gardens since 1912, showing Peter Pan blowing a horn and surrounded by fairies and woodland creatures.  See HERE.  

These pictures were taken on my phone and it was a really dull day, so I've converted them to mono. I may go back one day with my camera and try to get a better, closer image of the statue. 

The statue below is Samuel Cunliffe Lister, after whom the park is named. Erected in 1875, it commemorates the inventor, industrialist and founder of nearby Lister Mill, another huge Victorian textile mill. The panels on the plinth feature images of life in the mills. 

Then we have Saltaire's founder Sir Titus Salt: renowned industrialist, philanthropist and former mayor of Bradford, sitting under a Gothic style canopy, designed by Saltaire's architects Lockwood and Mawson. This statue was originally placed outside Bradford's Town (now City) Hall and was moved to the park in the 1890s. There have been recent discussions about whether it should remain in the park or be moved back to the city centre or perhaps to Saltaire. For now, he sits in splendour gazing down at the grand Norman Arch entrance to the park. 

 

Oops!

So there I was, taking photos in Leeds Corn Exchange with my phone. I don't know what I did but one of the pictures turned out like this! It's not at all what I intended but I decided I quite like the creative impressionism of it. It's the little red heart on the left that makes it, for me. I could never reproduce it though, as I have no idea which button I pressed in error! 

 

Leeds Kirkgate Market

Leeds Kirkgate Market is the largest covered market in Europe, holding 800 stalls. It has a long history dating back to the mid-1800s. In 1884, Marks and Spencer opened a penny bazaar here, which went on to become the famous high street clothing, home and food retailer, now a multinational brand. The clock at the centre of the market (below) was unveiled to celebrate the centenary of M&S in 1984. 

The market hall suffered a devastating fire in 1975, when much of the roof collapsed and some of the oldest parts of the multiple halls were destroyed, so there has been ongoing rebuilding work. My photos show the 1904 hall, which survived the fire, and has some lovely ironwork and tiling.