Thornton

Thornton, where the Brontë birthplace is situated, was once a separate village but is now a commuter suburb of Bradford, and in truth is a little run down in parts. Apart from the newly rescued and renovated parsonage where the Brontë sisters were born, perhaps its best known attraction is the collection of 19th century workers' cottages known as South Square, renovated in 1982 as a community arts centre with studios, a gallery and a café (above). 

Up on Market Street, quite near the Brontë birthplace, is the curiously shaped building known (for obvious reasons) as 'Coffin End'. This was once the Star Inn. One of its former landlords was transported to Australia for the crime of stealing ten shillings.

A signpost in the village points to various local places of interest, including the adjacent hamlets of Egypt and Moscow. Established in the early 19th century to house local stone quarry workers, their quirky international names were inspired by British military victories during the Napoleonic Wars. They are not far from the hamlet of Jerusalem and the Walls of Jericho, originally massive stone walls that held back the quarry spoil heaps. The walls have now been demolished for safety reasons but I remember them from my younger days - high, dark and forbidding. 

One of the nicest things, in my opinion, about Thornton is that it sits on the hillside overlooking Bradford dale, where streams come together to form Bradford Beck, a river which ultimately runs down to and under the city centre. There's a massive Victorian railway viaduct and far-reaching views from the village streets. 

Bingley St Ives

As we edge closer to spring, I'm enjoying the brief sunny interludes between the frequent showers. One day I drove up to the country park at Bingley St Ives and had a walk through the lower woodland. From the entrance drive, there are far reaching views up the valley to Harden and beyond. 

The estate is pleasant, though not my favourite woodland to explore. It's all rather messy, somehow, and a lot of trees have been felled because of disease, so there are areas where it's quite sparse. At this time of year it's muddy too. There are numerous little streams running down the hillside, and a few ponds where the water collects. Some of the original estate cottages survive and are still used. Those in my photo above are, I believe, Cuckoo's Nest Cottages. 

I was surprised to spot a wooden monk lurking in the undergrowth! It seemed rather eerie. Apparently in the Middle Ages the land was owned and farmed by monks from Rievaulx Abbey. Over the years all sorts of ghostly encounters have been reported (see HERE) so that I wouldn't be keen to be up there on my own at dusk. 

St Ives Mansion was originally built in 1616, and became the home of the Ferrand family, whose descendants lived there until 1929, when the estate was sold to Bingley Urban District Council. I think the present building mostly dates to the 19th century. It became a residential care home for young people with disabilities, and was then reputedly sold to become apartments, which seems never to have happened. It's a listed building but sadly in great need of repair, having been subject to vandalism and arson attacks. I just read in the local press that the owners are now intending to convert it back into a care home. They need to get on with it! 

I'm told it still has some Jacobean style features inside. On the outside wall there's a plaque, presumably a coat of arms - perhaps for the Ferrand family. Although the writing seems to be in English not Latin, I can't make out what it says at all. 

 

Sojourn in Paris #5

Paris 2025 - Elegant Paris 

There is undoubtedly an elegance to Paris, with its graceful architecture, lovely little green parks, fountains and statues. On Saturday, we wandered through the Marais district towards the River Seine. We passed through the lovely Place des Vosges, a fashionable and expensive place to live in the 17th and 18th centuries (no doubt still is!). The oldest square in Paris, it dates back to 1612 and was unusual for those times in that it was planned all as a piece, with the buildings all in the same design. 

Constructed between 1624 and 1630, the Hôtel de Sully was a private mansion, originally built for a wealthy financier. It now houses the organisation responsible for France's heritage sites. I found these statues (sphinxes?) really weird! 

Along the banks of the Seine, elegant houses abounded. I'd have loved to see inside the one below - Hôtel Lambert - on the Île Saint-Louis. It's not an hotel but a private mansion, built in 1640, and bought in 1975 by the Rothschilds, who restored it to its 17th century splendour. Lately owned and renovated by Sheikh Hamad bin Abdullah Al Thani, a member of Qatar's ruling family, it recently sold for $226 million (around £170m) to a telecoms billionaire. (See HERE for photos of the interior) 

Boston Spa

A few of us from the camera club went over to Boston Spa to meet with a friend and former member who lives there. It's a village about 25 miles from Saltaire, on the way to York. The village really came into being in the 1770s, when a sulphur spring was discovered that led to the development of a spa where visitors could 'take the waters'. By the early 1800s it was growing and thriving, which has left a legacy of fine Georgian buildings along the main street. As nearby Harrogate's popularity as a spa grew, Boston Spa's declined but the village remains an attractive and desirable place to visit and to live. 

The parish church of St Mary the Virgin (above) isn't very old as British churches go, built around 1880 on the site of an earlier church completed in 1814. 

Of course it is all much changed, but close attention to the buildings reveals details like arches through to yards at the rear. They were probably designed to allow horses and carriages through to stables at the back.  

Along the high street, I noticed a fine example of an old-fashioned milestone. 

Walking along the high street, I was trying to photograph some of the varied and attractive buildings - Georgian, Victorian, Edwardian and some much more recent that have been carefully designed to reference the styles of the older ones. (I'm always in two minds whether this is a good thing or not.)

It was around this point that my camera decided to die! All of a sudden it decided not to focus and completely jammed up, so that I was obliged to continue the rest of our walk using just my phone. (See if you can spot which photos I took with which instrument, over the course of my three posts about the day!) Thankfully, once I got home I was able to sort it out, though for some reason all its settings were wiped so that I had to start over and set it up 'from new'. 

Renovations in Shipley

There's a lot of money going into infrastructure in Shipley at the moment. This building here is now called Farfield: the Shipley Health and Wellbeing Community Centre. It has had the benefit of £3m for a full renovation from the Shipley Towns Fund (part of the government's 'Levelling up the UK' plan to invest in areas that have historically been underfunded). Formerly St Walburga's Primary School, it belongs to The Cellar Trust, a charity providing specialist mental health support. They have sought to create a calm, inclusive and accessible space for the community and are now looking for partners to run a café and offer therapeutic services. They say: 'Over time, our objective is to continue bringing people and organisations together to provide holistic support, amplify positive change, foster innovation and build a stronger, more connected community for everyone.'

Rather grand words... it would be good if they could bear positive fruit, as mental health is an area where support is very much needed and quite hard to come by.  

The renovation has been masterminded by Saltaire architects Rance Booth Smith (see HERE) and includes a new atrium, linking two wings of the original building, and a sensory garden. It looks as though it has been beautifully done, with great attention to detail. 

Rance Booth Smith have also designed and overseen the conversion of another former school building, dating back to the 1850s, in the centre of Shipley (see below). It's used by The Kirkgate Centre (a community and social action charity) and The Hive (a community arts charity). It's now the 'Shipley Sustainable Community Hub'. (See HERE) Again, it's been funded by Shipley Towns Fund, to the tune of £2.5m. The Hive now has bright and welcoming craft, pottery and woodwork rooms and the Kirkgate Centre provides a cafeteria and rooms that are extensively used by local groups for youth work, exercise classes, support groups and such like. I popped in when it was open and it is lovely inside, light and welcoming. I was going to take a few photos of the interior but it's been divided up in such a way that 'views through' are limited. In the main hall, lots of small children were having a great time playing with tons of Lego, but it wasn't appropriate to take photos of that. 

Show pieces

The centre of Bradford has some lovely and historic old buildings that they are working hard to keep in good shape and in use. It would have had more if it weren't for the mass destruction of Victoriana that took place in the 1970s, replacing some lovely old buildings, including the Kirkgate market, with Brutalist concrete monstrosities. In recent years many of those have been demolished in their turn, creating the spaces that are now part of another radical plan to transform and update the city. 

The Alhambra Theatre, above left, opened in 1914 and has since had several adaptations, the most recent being in the 1980s, when the 'glass box' was added to the front to increase the useable space 'front of house'. I think it was a very successful refurbishment and the theatre is a lovely place to go to see a show (though pricey, of course!) 

What is now Bradford Live, above right, was once the Odeon cinema (where I spent many happy hours in my student days). The art deco building opened in 1930 as a cinema and was one of the first to show 'talkies', finally closing in 2000. It then lay derelict and in increasingly bad shape until a visionary plan arose to revamp it as a live music venue. The progress was bumpy and the Council, who put a lot of money into it, looked on shaky ground when the original developer pulled out. Thankfully it has been taken over and just reopened. I don't know if it will host any shows I'd like to see but it looks fabulous inside, from pictures I've seen. 

The other jewel in Bradford's crown since the early 1980s is the Science and Media Museum, one of the few national museums not situated in London. Sadly, the wonderful photographic archive it originally held when it was opened, which led to some truly memorable photography exhibitions, has been hived off to the V&A in London, leaving the Media Museum to concentrate more on the technical aspects of photography, film and TV.  

 

A walk by the Aire

Half a mile or so north of Airton, on the way to Malham, lies the hamlet of Scosthrop. There's a farm shop and tearoom here, which provided a tasty lunch and respite from the drizzle for our camera club group.

At the back there's a wonderful view up the dale and you can probably make out in the distance the limestone scar that is the famous Malham Cove. 

Just opposite the farm shop is the handsome Scosthrop Manor (below) built in 1603. (If you want a peek inside this house, see this press article HERE.) 

From here we walked along the riverside path back to Airton.

The river is the infant River Aire, whose source is a stream from Malham Tarn that disappears into the limestone and then surfaces in a spring just outside Malham. It winds its way south, gathering strength, eventually passing through Saltaire and on through Leeds to its confluence with the Ouse.  I did wonder whether the water I could see here might arrive in Saltaire before or after me. Google informs me that the river flows on average at 5 miles per hour and the distance to Saltaire is about 25 miles so it might be there in about five hours. Interesting. 

Along the way we passed bits of old machinery related to when the Airton mill was working: various cogs and sluices. 

And then we came to the mill itself, once a corn mill for the village, then a cotton spinning mill during the Industrial Revolution. 

It's now been converted into apartments: Riverside Walk. One of our group told of when he was working on the construction site during the conversion. He'd just gone for a tea break when the bit of the building he had been in suddenly collapsed! Such disasters notwithstanding, the conversion appears to have been sympathetically done. The loggia below had a bit of a French feel to it, I thought. 

Airton

We had a camera club outing to Airton, a small village between Skipton and Malham. Unfortunately it happened to be a day when the much-needed rain came determinedly, in sheets of light, misty drizzle, interspersed with heavier showers. Not really a day for having cameras out but never mind. 

Airton is a very old and attractive village, constructed around various green spaces. Some of the buildings date back to the 17th century and others are more recent, early 19th century cottages no doubt linked to the cotton spinning mill, originally a corn mill, by the river. 

Oddly situated right in the middle of the village green, what is nowadays a rather pretty little rose-covered cottage is thought to be an early 19th century 'squatter cottage'. These were hastily constructed, illegal dwellings on what was common land.

Ellis House and Ellis Cottage were once one building, dating back to 1696. It has an impressive dovecote in the gable. The initials EWA on the lintel relate to the original owners, William and Alice Ellis. William Ellis was a master handloom linen weaver, and a Quaker. He bought the barn opposite the house and turned it into a Quaker Meeting Place, which I'll show you tomorrow. 

Heptonstall's oldest buildings

One of Heptonstall's oldest buildings is Stag Cottage in Stag Fold, which dates back to the 1500s. I tried to get a photo of it (above), as it is charming, but the light was very tricky. You can get a better appreciation of it, inside and out, from the website listing it as a holiday let, HERE. There are several 'folds' in the village. The term originally meant an enclosure where animals were kept, but in Yorkshire it seems to have become a term for cottages clustered around a yard, perhaps originally all belonging to the same family.

One of the old buildings on the main street was the Cloth Hall, where the 'pieces' woven by the handloom weavers were brought, from their homes, to be sold to merchants. It's now a private residence and you can discern areas on the stonework where alterations have been made during its history. Above the door is a datestone: 1545-1558. 

There's an archway preserved, just off Northgate, inscribed with the initials IB and the date 1578. 

I'm sure there are more charming corners I've yet to discover.