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This blog will cause some controversy - but its a healthy debate to have Ask someone to describe Pudsey and there’s a fair chance the words “market town” might crop up. Even Leeds Markets currently describes Pudsey as a “Victorian market town” . Fair enough. We have a Market Place, we have an on/off market, and generations of Pudsey folk have shopped there. But history has an irritating habit of getting in the way of a good description. Because there’s another possibility: Pudsey wasn’t a market town at all. It was a booming woollen town which eventually needed a market. From the late 1920s the open area in Pudsey centre held a market using temporary stalls, note the pedestrianised area leading from Church Lane to the Park. This now holds our ‘award winning’ bus station. From Britain from above_EPW023815. The case for “Market Town” Let’s be fair – Pudsey certainly looks the part, and I've brightened up these old black and white photos to help tell its...

I was watching the BBC documentary Secrets of the Bayeux Tapestry: Inside the Museum , following the job of bringing the nearly 1,000-year-old embroidery back across the Channel for its British Museum exhibition. Sir Michael Palin narrates, with historians including Janina Ramirez and David Olusoga helping unpick the story behind those famous stitches. Then came a statement that made me splutter: King Charles III can trace his ancestry back to William the Conqueror. “Hang on,” I thought. “ Surely that's bollocks? ” After nearly a thousand years of murdered kings, childless monarchs, civil wars, illegitimate offspring, imported Germans and enough wife-swapping to keep a medieval soap opera going indefinitely, how can that family tree possibly still work? Annoyingly, it basically does. It's all relative... The trick is that royal dynasties ended, but genealogical descent carried on through daughters, sisters and cousins. William's Norman dynasty gave way to the Plantagenets t...

You can spend hours exploring Fulneck — but what if you’ve only got two minutes? Here goes…   The story begins in 18th-century Europe , with the Moravians: a Protestant Christian community whose roots stretched back centuries, but after persecution and fleeing for their lives, they found new life under Count Nikolaus von Zinzendorf in Saxony. Their big idea was remarkably simple — faith should be lived, not merely preached . That idea travelled to Yorkshire. In the 1740s, evangelist Benjamin Ingham was preaching across the north of England and became closely associated with the Missionary Moravians based in England. Land at Lamb’s Hill above Pudsey provided the opportunity to establish a permanent community for both followers of Ingham and the Moravians. From 1744 the settlement that became Fulneck began to grow. And it really was a settlement . There was worship, education, accommodation and work, with the community organised around a distinctive way of life. At its heart ...

Hidden beneath Pudsey is a piece of railway engineering that most of us have never had the chance to walk through. And this weekend, for the first time in 20 years, we can.   Our story begins before the tunnel existed. Pudsey was booming during the Victorian period, but its railway station was inconveniently down at Stanningley. After years of complaints, the Pudsey Branch Line finally reached Greenside, opening for goods in 1877 and passengers in 1878. Initially it was a dead end — six passenger trains a day, three each way, and weekdays only. But Pudsey was an important industrial town and wanted better connections. So the railway companies came up with a wonderfully Victorian solution: dig through the hill and carry the railway across the valley.   Construction of Greenside Tunnel began in 1891 as part of the extension which transformed the branch into the Pudsey Loop . Beyond the tunnel came another impressive feat of engineering — the enormous Tyersal embankment. T...