Birstall, West Riding of Yorkshire
Historical Description
Birstall, a village and the head of a civil parish comprising 12 ecclesiastical parishes in the W.R. Yorkshire. It has a station on the L. & N.W.R., and a post, money order, and telegraph office under Leeds. Area of urban sanitary district, 1233 acres; population, 6528; of the ecclesiastical parish of Birstall St Peter, 4286. Many of the inhabitants are employed in numerous factories or in handicrafts connected with them, and not a few are miners of coal and ironstone. The living is a vicarage in the diocese of Wakefield; gross value, £400 with residence. Patron, the Bishop of Wakefield. The church was rebuilt in 1866. The tower is supposed to date from the 11th century. There are several dissenting chapels. Dr Priestley, Unitarian writer and natural philosopher, was a native.
Administration
The following is a list of the administrative units in which this place was either wholly or partly included.
Ancient County | Yorkshire | |
Ecclesiastical parish | Birstal St. Peter | |
Poor Law union | Bradford | |
Riding | West | |
Wapentake | Morley |
Any dates in this table should be used as a guide only.
Directories & Gazetteers
We have transcribed the entry for Birstall from the following:
- Samuel Lewis' A Topographical Dictionary of England, by Samuel Lewis, seventh edition, published 1858. (Birstal (St. Peter))
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 Birstall 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: