West Bowling sits within the Little Horton ward in the City of Bradford Metropolitan District, West Yorkshire. The ward also takes in Marshfields and the Canterbury housing estate, all of them positioned on gently sloping land to the southeast of Bradford city centre. The wider Little Horton ward recorded a population of 17,368 at the 2001 census, rising to 21,547 by the 2011 census, reflecting steady growth across the area.
A Settlement with Deep Roots
The name Horton comes from the Old English words horu, meaning dirt, and tūn, meaning settlement or farm, pointing to land that was historically muddy and poorly suited to arable farming. Because the soil made crop growing nearly impossible, manufacturing and trade became the foundation of the local economy from an early stage. The distinction between Little Horton and Great Horton simply reflected their relative sizes within the old Manor of Horton. The de Horton family became Lords of the Manor around 1294, after Robert de Stapleton received the land from King Henry II as a reward for services to the Crown. The title passed through several prominent Bradford families over the centuries before returning to the Horton family in 1640. The last holder of the title was Charles Horton Rhys in the early nineteenth century.
Waves of Settlement
The area around West Bowling has drawn settlers from a wide range of origins across many centuries. The Angles, Norse, Danish, and Norman French all left their mark, and there may have been Celtic communities here before any of them. German cloth merchants arrived in later centuries, followed in the mid-nineteenth century by people from rural Britain and Ireland who came to work in Bradford’s expanding textile industries during the Industrial Revolution. Through the twentieth century, communities from Poland, Latvia, Serbia, Russia, India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and the Caribbean settled here, some arriving as refugees or asylum seekers, others seeking work in the mills. This long sequence of arrivals has shaped the character of the ward over more than a thousand years.
Pre-Industrial Traces
At Little Horton Green, a short distance from West Bowling, a number of original farmhouses and outbuildings survive, physical reminders that this was once agricultural land. Opposite the farms, typical three-storey weavers’ cottages can still be seen. In the eighteenth century, Samuel Swaine used these buildings to weave cotton rather than wool. A house and barn bearing a date stone of 1755 were later used by a Mr Kay for the manufacture and sale of cotton into the early nineteenth century, marking the transition from farming to industry that defined the whole district.