A QUIET view up Fell Lane, from a postcard sent in 1907. The horse-drawn delivery van has obligingly posed for the camera in the middle of the street, while the road-sweeper (a character out of a Thomas Hardy novel, with his trouser-legs tied below the knee) continues to collect horse droppings.

The garden walls along the row of houses are topped by railings. In Keighley as elsewhere, their compulsory removal was to begin in 1940. This was an unpopular measure, but householders were told they must "accept it as a contribution to the war effort". Many were still awaiting compensation years after the war, when officialdom decreed that "railings, which when severed lose their original character, have no second-hand value except as scrap metal".

On the far left can be glimpsed No 15 Branch of the Keighley Industrial Co-operative Society, built in 1897. The Co-op was also responsible for some of the houses in this area, hence the names Hive Street and Industrial Street.

Prominent in the left background stands the Fell Lane Infirmary, subsequently better known as St John’s Hospital.