minutes NEW book encourages Haworth residents and visitors to take a journey to the past.

Like time travellers they can to see the village as it once was thanks to dozens of old pictures.

Readers can easily compare past and present views thanks to modern-day photographs on the same pages.

Haworth History Tour has been designed as a pocket-size paperback so people can take it along with them on walks.

They will be guided from Mill Hey near the railway station, through the village park and up Main Street, exploring hidden side passages and historic outlying streets along the way.

The 96-page book has been written by Haworth historian Steven Ward with photographs by local man Ian Palmer.

Steven said Haworth was famed mostly for the 40-year residents of the Brontë family, but the village had probably been there for 1,000 years.

He said: “It is a Pennine village that made its living from farming, stone quarrying and textile manufacture.

“Photographs have mostly been of the church and parsonage, but I have tried to bring together a selection

of old photographs that give a more representative picture of the place.”

Mr Wood said the making of the Blue Bell Turnpike in 1755 probably caused the initial development of Main Street, linking the settlements of Hall Green and Haworth.

A second turnpike road was built in 1814 from Lees to Hebden Bridge, later forming the upper limit of development on Haworth Brow.

Mr Wood believes the opening of a branch railway from Keighley in 1867 – now the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway – must have encouraged the village’s major expansion.

Meanwhile the development of many Nonconformist chapels in the Haworth area was partly because William Grimshaw, one of the leaders of the evangelical revival of the 18th century, was a local minister.

Mr Wood added: “The collapse of the Yorkshire Dales lead mining industry and a widespread agricultural depression elsewhere brought many families into the area in the 1880s and 1890s.”

Into the 20th century, two large areas of older housing were demolished in the name of slum clearance.

A new road bypassed Main Street and the Mytholmes route from Haworth to Oakworth was greatly

improved.

Mr Wood said the old and new photos, taken as often as possible from the same viewpoint, showed how these and other factors have changed the village.

He said they also captured the changes wrought in recent decades by new housing developers, the closures of local shops and the impact of tourism.

Haworth History Tour is available from Amberley Publishing at £6.99.