Bingley, West Riding of Yorkshire

Historical Description

Bingley, a town and a parish in the W.R. Yorkshire. The town stands on an eminence, amid wooded environs, with picturesque views, adjacent to the river Aire, the North Midland railway, and the Leeds and Liverpool Canal, 6 miles NW of Bradford. It is named among the places given by William the Conqueror to his followers, and it had an ancient castle which has disappeared. It now consists chiefly of one long street of stone houses, and it has undergone much recent improvement in connection with manufactures. It is governed by a local board for the outer districts, and improvement commissioners for the town, the latter appointed under a special Act. It has a town hall, a post, money order, and telegraph office (in buildings erected in 1893), two banks, a railway station, two chief inns, a parish church, a church for the parish of Holy Trinity, Congregational, Baptist, Wesleyan, Primitive Methodist, Roman Catholic, and Christian Brethren chapels, a free grammar school, a technical school, and a public free library, opened in 1892; and is a seat of petty sessions. The church is a plain structure of the time of Henry VIII., and was completely restored in 1871. The grammar school dates from 1529, was recently rebuilt, and has an endowment of about £800 a year. A weekly market was formerly held on Tuesdays, and cattle fairs are now held on the first Tuesday of April, and the second Tuesday of Oct. Industry is carried on in an extensive manufacture of worsted yarn, dress goods, and in ironfounding, tanning, and malting. The parish consists of the townships of Morton East and West, the hamlets of Eldwick, Harden, Micklethwaite, and the township of Bingley. Area of the parish, 10,336 acres; population of the civil parish, 19,284; of the ecclesiastical parish of All Saints, 6542, of Holy Trinity, 5663. Riddlesden Hall was anciently the seat of the Maudes. A large treasure in Roman coins was found in Morton. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Ripon; gross value, £550 with residence. Patron, the Bishop of Ripon. The ecclesiastical parish of Holy Trinity was constituted in 1869. The living is a vicarage; net value, £168 with residence, in the gift of the Bishop of Ripon. There are Conservative and Liberal clubs, a cemetery of 10 acres under the control of a Burial Board, a public park of 18 acres, called the Prince of Wales Park, situated on the hill overlooking the town, from which fine views are obtained; also the fine seats of St Ives, Milner Field, and Longwood Hall.

Administration

The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.

Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.

Church Records

Bingley Parish Registers (Christenings, Marriages, Burials), 1577-1686 (£)

Directories & Gazetteers

We have transcribed the entry for Bingley from the following:

• Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Bingley (All Saints))

Land and Property

The Return of Owners of Land in 1873 for the West Riding of Yorkshire is available to browse.

Maps

Online maps of Bingley are available from a number of sites:

• Bing (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• Google Streetview.
• National Library of Scotland. (Old maps)
• OpenStreetMap.
• old-maps.co.uk (Old Ordnance Survey maps to buy).
• Streetmap.co.uk (Current Ordnance Survey maps).
• A Vision of Britain through Time. (Old maps)

Newspapers and Periodicals

The British Newspaper Archive have fully searchable digitised copies of the following West Riding newspapers online:

• Yorkshire Post and Leeds Intelligencer
• Leeds Mercury
• Yorkshire Evening Post
• Huddersfield Chronicle
• Leeds Intelligencer
• Bradford Observer
• Bradford Daily Telegraph