THIS late-Victorian view of Church Green – historically called Church Street – includes the King’s Arms Wine and Spirit Vaults and adjoining shops, which would be demolished in 1966.
On the left are the curving tracks of the Keighley Tramways Company, founded in 1889.
In the 1880s, Church Green boasted no less than six public houses – the Commercial, the Crown, the Hole-i’-th’-Wall, the King’s Arms, the Lord Rodney and the Devonshire, with beer retailers Timothy Maud and the Crown Tap for good measure.
Small wonder that in 1869, Miss Sarah Hannah Butterfield, of Cliffe Hall, had presented a drinking fountain as an alternative for the thirsty!
There was a traditional reason for inns near the church. “People came from miles around to the services on Sunday,” an earlier Victorian resident recalled. “They often brought food with them, but they could obtain food also from the many inns clustered round the church. Broth with dumpling cost a penny a basin, but only a halfpenny without.”
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