Horbury is a town in the City of Wakefield in West
Yorkshire, England. Historically in the West Riding of
Yorkshire, it is situated north of the River Calder about
three miles (5 km) south west of Wakefield and two
miles (3 km) to the south of Ossett. It includes the
outlying areas of Horbury Bridge and Horbury
Junction. At the 2001 census the Horbury and South
Ossett ward of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council
had a population of 10,002.[1] At the 2011 census the
population was 15,032. Old industries include
woollens, engineering and building wagons for the
railways. Horbury forms part of the Heavy Woollen
District.
The name Horbury is attested in 1086 as (H)orberie. It
is derived from Old English horu ‘dirty land’ and burh
(in its dative form byrig), which translates as ‘filthy
fortification’ or ‘stronghold on muddy land’.[4] Other
spellings include Orberie, Horbiry and Horberie.[5] The
name possibly referred to a fortification near an old
fording point of the River Calder.
The settlement predates the Domesday Book of 1086 in
which Horbury and Crigglestone, on the south side of the
River Calder, were the only parts of the Manor of
Wakefield not described as “waste”. The survey recorded
about 40 people and four ox-drawn ploughs in ‘Orberie’
and ‘Crigeston’ combined. About 400 acres (1.6 km2
) of
land were in cultivation and much woodland. Horbury
had a church dating from about 1106 which was a
daughter church of the church in Wakefield and possibly
replaced an earlier Saxon church.
The Norman church
had a tower, nave and chancel.
The Manor of Wakefield was given by the crown to the
Earls Warenne in 1106 and was held by them until 1359.
Sir Robert de Horbiry and Sir John de Horbiry were
stewards to the Earl de Warenne, who granted Sir John
Coordinates: 53.6595°N 1.5566°W
Horbury
History
Toponymy
Manor
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Bridge over the River Calder
Charles Roberts Works
the village of Horbury and its lands for life.[9] After the death of Sir John de Horbury in 1306, it
became one of the constituent ‘graveships’ of the Manor of Wakefield.
The oldest surviving house in the town is Horbury Hall in Church Street, built by Ralph Amyas,
deputy steward of the Manor of Wakefield. It has been dated by dendrochronology to 1474. Other
old buildings include the tithe barn.[10] The land in Horbury was divided into three great fields,
Northfield, Southfield and Westfield, and remains of medieval ridge and furrow of strip cultivation
are visible in Carr Lodge Park.
A wooden bridge spanned the River Calder on the road from
Wakefield to Huddersfield in the 15th century. Money for its
upkeep was left in local wills dated 1404 and 1492, a custom
that continued into the 16th century. A stone-arched bridge
that replaced the wooden structure in the 17th century lasted
until it partly collapsed in 1918. A new bridge was completed in
1930 and was repaired in 1991 at a cost of £2 million.
Horbury Bridge was flooded after heavy rain in 1946.
Wool spinning and cloth manufacture were important
originally as cottage industries.
[14] At the start of the Industrial
Revolution steam engines were installed at Race’s Mill in
Dudfleet and Foster’s Mill on Engine Lane in 1795.
Resistance to the implementation of new textile machinery and
the factory system was shown when Luddites, who blamed the
new factories for depriving weavers from earning a living in a
time of widespread hunger and poverty, destroyed Fosters
Mill.
Albion Mills and Millfield Mills were built in the 1870s. William
Sykes’s sports goods works which became part of Slazengers was established at about this time.[17]
Slazenger had four factories which produced sports equipment. Since the factories closed the name
is preserved in Slazengers Sports and Social Club, which has facilities and floodlit grounds for
many different sporting activities.
Charles Roberts (1831–1892) who described himself as a joiner, moved the Buffer and Wagon
Works he had established on Ings Road, Wakefield to a site at Horbury Junction in 1873. Between
1901 and 1956 the company built 110,000 railway wagons of varying types and by 1945 Charles
Roberts and Co.’s works covered 45 acres including the adjacent site of the Horbury Junction Iron
Company which it had taken over in 1923. During the First World War the firm was among the
first to employ women who were employed to forge shell covers. During the Second World War,
the wagon works was used for armament manufacture, and made 1,300 Churchill tanks, half a
million naval shells and one and a half million trench mortar bombs. The Horbury Junction
Iron Company site was used to build tram bodies for Blackpool and Sheffield trams.
The works later became owned by Procor and then Bombardier Inc. The last vehicles constructed
at the site were Bombardier Voyager trains, the plant closed in 2005; the engineering company
Eddison & Wanless now occupies the site.
Horbury Bridge
Industrial history
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Horbury Town Hall
Horbury Compared in 2008
2008 UK
Population
Estimates
[25]
Horbury
Yorkshire
and the
Humber
England
Total
population
9,998 5,213,200 51,446,200
White 98.6% 90.6% 88.2%
Asian 0.5% 5.7% 5.7%
Black 0.1% 1.3% 2.8%
In 1905, Richard Sutcliffe (1849–1930), who had worked as part-time manager at Hartley Bank
Colliery across the valley in Netherton, opened his Universal Works on the site of the old dye house
mill on the Horbury-Wakefield boundary in 1905 and started to manufacture conveyor belts and
mining machinery. In 1972 the company employed 742 people at its Horbury site.
Historically Horbury was a chapelry in the parish of Wakefield,
in the lower division of the Wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley
and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire.
[14] Following the
implementation of the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834,
Horbury became one of the 17 constituent parishes of the
Wakefield Poor Law Union formed in 1837. Horbury Town
Hall was commissioned by the Urban District Council; its
foundation stone was laid by Joshua Harrop on 30 July 1902
and it was built by Henry Fallas & Sons of Horbury.
Horbury encompasses the neighbourhoods of Horbury Bridge, named after the crossing of the
River Calder and Horbury Junction, named after the railway junction. It covers an area of 1,162
acres (470 ha).
The River Calder flows generally west to east in a wide valley across the south of
the town alongside the Calder and Hebble Navigation which made the river navigable to Sowerby
Bridge. The town centre is on a hill on the north side of the River Calder and most of the land
slopes towards the river. The A642 Wakefield to Huddersfield road bypasses the town to the south
of the town centre with a branch road to Horbury Junction. The B6128 goes through the town
centre and connects with Ossett to the north. The M1 motorway passes to the east of the town with
the nearest access at J40 A638 in Ossett.
A network of local buses, coordinated by West Yorkshire Metro connects Horbury with Wakefield,
Ossett, and Huddersfield. The M1 motorway to the east of the town is accessed at junctions 39 at
Durkar and 40 at Ossett.
Proposals were made for a railway through Horbury in the 1830s and an Act of Parliament was
passed for the Manchester and Leeds Railway engineered by George Stephenson in 1836. Horbury
has had three stations, Horbury & Ossett at Horbury Bridge of 1840, Horbury Junction on Green
Lane of 1853 and Millfield Road at Horbury Junction opened in 1927. All are closed.[27]
Horbury Town School on Tithe Barn Street was enlarged in 1789 but it is not known when it was
built. By 1870 there were 113 pupils paying fees of 3d to 6d weekly. It closed in 1886.[28] The
“Gaskell School” was built on New Road in 1842 by Daniel Gaskell of Lupset Hall. It was used until
1887.[29] St Peter’s Church of England School was founded in 1849 close to the church. It was
replaced by the present school in the early 1980s.[30]
In September 2010 St Peter’s Junior School
amalgamated with Clifton Infant School to form a new primary school. A new building is proposed
to be built on the current St Peter’s site with a completion date of September 2012.
Horbury Council School catering for all age groups on Northfield Lane was opened in 1913
becoming Horbury County Secondary Modern in 1952. The infant school remained on the site and
the junior school moved to the Wesleyan School at Horbury Junction. In 1962 secondary pupils
moved to a new school. The Northfield Lane school became Horbury County Junior School and
Horbury County Infant School. After a fire in 2000 and a £1m upgrade the schools amalgamated,
becoming Horbury Primary School in 2002.[31]
Horbury Academy (formerly Horbury School) caters for pupils aged 11 to 16 in a new building
completed in 2009 on the same site as the old one.
Horbury had a chapel of ease to the Church of All Saints in
Wakefield, from before the time of the Domesday Book. The
chapel was replaced by a Norman chapel with a nave and tower
that stood until it was replaced by the present church in 1790.
St Peter and St Leonard’s Church, the parish church, was
designed by John Carr, the Horbury born architect who built it
in the Georgian neo-classical style between 1790 and 1794 at a
cost to himself of £8,000. He is buried in a vault beneath the
north aisle.
Transport
Education
Religion
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St John’s Church, Horbury Bridge
The foundation of St John’s Church at Horbury Bridge was in a
mission meeting in a room in what is now the hairdressers in
- Funds were raised and the church was built with stone
from Horbury Quarry in 1884. The curate, Sabine BaringGould, wrote the hymn “Onward Christian Soldiers” in 1865 for the Whitsun procession to Horbury Church.[32] Another
mission was set up at Horbury Junction in 1887 and St Mary’s
Church was built in 1893. A Methodist society was established in Horbury in about 1746,
meeting for worship in a private house in Cluntergate. In 1765
the congregation built a chapel seating perhaps 200, also in
Cluntergate, adjacent to the house which later became the Working Men’s Club. In 1824 a branch
of Methodism called the New Connexion erected a chapel in Northgate; the Society was short-lived
but the building survives to this day – as a private house. The Primitive Methodists built their first
chapel in Horbury in 1841 in High Street, and four years later the Wesleyans built a chapel on the
adjoining plot to replace the one in Cluntergate. The Free Methodists built a small chapel in Queen
Street in 1857 which served them until 1900, when they built a larger one at the bottom of Bank
Street which was bought by Nettleton’s in 1958.
The Primitive Methodists built a larger chapel in 1875 on the site of their 1841 building, and the
Wesleyans similarly replaced their 1845 chapel in 1884. The Wesleyans had established a mission
in Horbury Junction in 1878 and built a chapel there in 1887.
In 1958, many years after Methodist Union, the congregations of the former Wesleyan and
Primitive churches amalgamated using the 1884 Wesleyan building for worship and the Primitive’s
Sunday school for other activities. The congregation of the Horbury Junction chapel joined them in
1969.
In 2012 the 1884 building, having been found to be unsafe, was demolished and a new church was
constructed further back from the High Street and connected to the old Sunday School. The new
building was formally opened on 10 September 2016.
The Salvation Army corps’ former headquarters on Peel Street is now disused, the congregation
moving to the Leeds Road, Gawthorpe, Ossett premises. The former Tithe Barn Christian Centre,
Westfield Road, is now similarly disused.
Horbury Library on Westfield Road was built in 1905 with a donation from the Carnegie
foundation. It celebrated its centenary in 2005 with the making of a community tapestry, which
now hangs in the library.[34] Horbury is policed by the West Yorkshire Police force from Ossett
Police Station and is within the DA, Wakefield division, which covers the whole district.[35] The
statutory emergency fire and rescue service is provided by the West Yorkshire Fire and Rescue
Service from Wakefield Fire Station.[36] Hospital services are provided by the Mid Yorkshire
Hospitals NHS Trust. Pinderfields Hospital is the nearest hospital with an Accident and
Emergency department. Community health services, including GPs, district and community
nurses, dentists and pharmacists, are co-ordinated by Wakefield District Primary Care
Trust. Waste management is co-ordinated by the local authority. Horbury’s distribution. Wikipedia