ILKLEY CONSERVATION AREA
Historical development and changing character of the conservation area
The medieval village and 19th-century town of Ilkley was constructed on one of the most important Roman sites in West Yorkshire. A fort was built here in the 1st century AD to guard a junction in the Roman road system, at the point where a north-south route, across the Wharfe, met one of the main east-west trans-Pennine roads, from Ribchester to York. At that junction a civilian settlement, or vicus, also developed, principally along the east-west road, now approximately the line of The Grove. Discoveries of Roman remains have been recorded at Ilkley from the 16th century onwards. Some of these finds can be seen in the Manor House Museum, which occupies part of the fort area. The only upstanding Roman masonry is a stretch of the western fort wall behind the Museum, though the extent of the fort is partially visible as a modified earthwork.
In post-Roman times part of the fort area became a Christian burial ground: so much is evident from the exceptionally fine Anglo-Saxon crosses which formerly stood in various parts of the churchyard, but were later brought together on the south side and have now been housed in the parish church tower. They date to the 9th century. A stone church may have existed there by that date, as two Roman altars, also preserved in the church, had been recut to form Anglo-Saxon doorway or window lintels. By the 10th century, Ilkley was part of the Archbishop of York's Wharfedale estates, centered on Otley; it may have been part of that estate since the late 7th century. The archbishops appear to have lost most of Ilkley to other landowners in the late 10th century, and the church and priest recorded there in 1086 are likely to have belonged to the Norman lord William de Percy.
It is probable that the Anglo-Saxon and Norman manorial halls were also located on the fort site. They were certainly there during the 13th and 14th centuries, as remains of medieval structures have been found built out of the Roman walls to the north of the Manor House Museum: these include a stone latrine, indicative of manorial status. The earliest part of the present 'Manor House', dating probably to the 14th century, also belonged to this group of buildings, though the rest of the structure was evidently demolished during rebuilding works of the 16th and 17th centuries, when the 'Manor House' reached its present form. The nearby parish church is presumably also on the site of its Anglo-Saxon predecessor. It was largely rebuilt in the 15th century, though it incorporates a south doorway of 13th-century date. The nave was lengthened and the eastern parts of the church were rebuilt in 1861.
Both medieval manor house and church made extensive use of the Roman building materials available, and the same is true of the medieval and later farmhouses and outbuildings, often single-storey buildings with masonry walls and thatched roofs. These survived until Ilkley's development as a spa town in the later19th century. The medieval settlement lay near the manor house and church, on both sides of what is now Church Street, and this is the only part of the present town where a significant number of 18th and early 19th-century buildings survive. They include, on the north side, the Mallard Inn dated 1709, and beyond the western end of the old village, the Grammar School of 1635. On the south side of the street, the Box Tree is an early 18th-century farmhouse.
Other farmhouses and cottages extended along what is now Brook Street south of its junction with Church Street, along both sides of the stream that flowed down Mill Ghyll. This was one of the routeways to the common pastures of Ilkley Moor, and also the location of the manorial water corn mill, first recorded in the early 13th century. Another routeway, further west, emerged into Green Lane, a lane parallel to Church Street which followed a stretch of the Roman road and was later transformed into The Grove.
Ilkley had developed little beyond this framework by the mid-19th century. It was still largely an agricultural community, with an involvement in textiles. It had had a fulling mill since at least 1378, when the Poll Tax recorded two 'walkers' or fullers. Their water-powered mill was presumably located in Mill Ghyll, near the corn mill, and may later have been transformed into one of the two corn mills shown on mid 19th century OS maps. The stone quarries on the edge of Ilkley Moor represented another industry, and the map shows the haul roads to Hanging Stones quarries, running through the common pastures called the Cow Pasture, occupying the line later taken by Cowpasture Road. These routeways and lanes, together with Bridge Lane leading to the 17th-century bridge across the Wharfe, created the basic planning frame for the phenomenal expansion on Ilkley in the 1860s.
The expansion was founded on a different industry; one based on the curative qualities of the water, which issued from the ground at White Wells, south of the conservation area. The Middletons, the principal landowners and lords of the manor developed the wells as a spa, during the 18th century, and this establishment seems to have been well visited, mainly from the surrounding urban areas, by the 1820s. It led to the appearance of over 30 lodging houses by 1829, the year when the Charitable Institution baths were erected next to White Wells. To accommodate visitors a large new inn called the Lister Arms was built on Church Street in 1825; and to facilitate their journeys, a carriage and donkey hiring business was set up in Bridge Lane: the steps formerly leading up to this establishment are still extant. In the 1831 census nearly a quarter of the recorded population comprised visitors.
Development outside the old village areas was, however, slow. Dixon's Hall was built off what became Wells Road in the 1820s. The site of one of the corn mills was used for the erection of Wells House (later Bradford and Ilkley Community College) in 1856. The Grove Hospital was constructed in 1862. Some building land was released in 1858 when the Cow Pasture was enclosed: Craiglands, Troutbeck and Rockwood House were erected soon afterwards; but the Middletons were unwilling to release land. The triggers for rapid development were twofold: the coming of the railway to Ilkley in 1865, and the first major land sales by the Middletons in 1867. The town centre was rapidly developed, and after a slump during the 1880s, further significant development shaped the present conservation area during the 1890s and early 1900s.
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