THIS old view of what came to be known as Baptist Square – near the bottom of West Lane – illustrates the earlier years of the baptists in Keighley, with their Turkey Street Chapel on the right and their Sunday School on the left.

After some years of meetings in members’ homes, this chapel had opened in 1815, complete with a burial ground.

It was hopefully designed to accommodate up to 600, and by 1825 pipes were being “laid from the town’s wells, in order to conduct water into the chapel for the purpose of baptising there.”

When Sunday School scholars were brought into chapel services, a teacher in “an elevated position” with a long rod “would give a gentle tap to those children who were restless, or inclined to distract the congregation by snoring”.

These buildings were superseded in 1865 by the Albert Street Chapel and Sunday School, at whose opening ceremony a baptist minister recalled how he had once preached in Turkey Street and found it an “awfully dull and most inconvenient place of worship”.