Travel Reference
In-Depth Information
shop. Salt's Mill of 1853, the Palace of Industry, is a six-storey, 22m high building, 166m
x 15m, and the upper floor was thought to be the largest room in Europe. The Italian-style
buildings include a chimney disguised as a campanile, modelled on Santa Maria Glorioso in
Venice. An adjacent single-storey, 100m weaving shed had 1,200 looms and there was a 64m
x 34m combing shed. These days there is the largest display of David Hockney works. An
adjacent United Reformed church of 1859 is a particularly splendid building. The Victoria
Hall has a reed organ and harmonium collection.
On the other side of the river, the Shipley Glen Tramway dates from 1895 and is Britain's
oldest working cable tramway, operating to the Bracken Hall Countryside Centre. The park
is said to have been one of the most beautiful in the world and was one of the world's first
amusement parks until the tow on a toboggan ride broke in 1900 with fatal results. The four
lion sculptures that guard Victoria Hall, near the grammar school, are ones that were rejected
from London's Trafalgar Square as they were thought to be too small.
Mills before Oddy Two Rise Locks
.
At Cottingley in 1917, two young girls claimed they played with fairies by the waterside.
They borrowed a camera, asked to be shown how it worked and duly came back with pic-
tures. They did the same again in 1920. Experts could find no evidence of forgery and Sir
Arthur Conan Doyle even said he could see movement in these pictures, which baffled the
nation. In 1983 one of them admitted it had been done with cutouts on hat pins but the other
died still claiming there was no trickery.
Bingley was a medieval wool and market town, chartered in 1212 but named after the
Old English man Bynna, Bynnings
leah
being his people's glade. There is an ancient market
cross, Georgian market hall and Bronze Age round barrows. The 16th century Holy Trinity
church, with its massive spire, has an early Norman fort and fragments of a Saxon cross.
