The Generously Muted Municipal Buildings Of Keighley

Towards the end of the nineteenth century municipal competitiveness was all the rage in the north of England. The rivalries between neighbouring mill towns in Yorkshire and Lancashire was fought out on the football field, the cricket field, and the rugby ground: but as town treasury coffers grew in size, that competitiveness began to extend to the scale, design and elegance of the municipal buildings themselves. A Great British Town Hall Race was instigated to achieve the most striking edifice that would reflect the grandeur of the local community.

For some reason, the town of Keighley never seemed to have entered the race. Perhaps the civic leaders were too canny: they spent their money constructing a technical college worthy of a Venetian Prince, and two or three grand looking pubs as well. The Municipal Buildings - which are shown on this early twentieth century postcard from Fowler Beanland's collection - were generously muted and even then they were shared with the town's post office. The post office has now moved across the road to a modern shopping centre: but the municipal buildings are still there and still generously muted.

Friendship Abides If Distance Divides

This vintage postcard comes from the collection of my Great Uncle, Fowler Beanland. In the early years of the twentieth century, Fowler had moved to Longtown in Cumbria to find work in the bobbin making industry there. He was an avid collector of postcards and many of his friends and relatives from the Keighley area of West Yorkshire would send him cards of that area to add to his collection.

This card of the Victoria Hospital in Keighley was one such card. Originally built as a "cottage hospital" in the 1870s, it was later extended to become the towns' main hospital until the new Airedale Hospital was built in the 1970s and the old Victoria Hospital was demolished.

L.P. sent the card to Fowler, but I have no idea who L.P. was and therefore I can't tell you whether friendship did abide for long.

Postcards From Home : An Edwardian Google Street View

I took delivery of a newly acquired Edwardian picture postcard the other day - a view looking up Manningham Lane in Bradford. There was something rather familiar about the scene, especially the wrought iron canopy on the right of the photograph. After a little digging I discovered I had another old postcard featuring the same canopy and looking the other way - down Manningham Lane towards the city centre.

What I have finished up with, of course, is a kind of Edwardian Google Street View. This gave rise to the thought that if I can ever gather together enough old vintage postcards of West Yorkshire I can somehow stitch them all together to provide a dynamic bridge to the past.

I wrote about the original postcard (the second one displayed here) back in 2009 and the discovery of a second view of essentially the same buildings gives me an excuse to share the short description I first published seven years ago. 

"I recently acquired a new postcard which shows Manningham Lane in Bradford in 1902. On the left of the Francis Frith card are the Royal Standard Hotel, the Theatre Royal, and the Theatre Tavern, all of which are now sadly gone. The grand building in the centre background was the Bradford office of the Yorkshire Penny Bank. The last time I checked - about a year ago - it was occupied by a bar called "Brass" which had, thank goodness, retained a fair amount of the internal decorations.

All the buildings in the foreground were still in existence until the 1980s and 90s when they either burnt down or were demolished to make way for a monstrous new inner ring road. The Royal Standard was originally built as a Turkish Bath which came to have its own licenced refreshment rooms. Eventually the refreshments superseded the bathing and it changed its name to the Royal Standard Hotel. Towards the end of its life the Royal Standard became a bit of a dive (the whole Manningham Lane area had fallen on hard times by then) and it was a regular haunt of Peter Sutcliffe, more famously known as The Yorkshire Ripper."