Horbury, United Kingdom

The oldest surviving house in the town is Horbury Hall in Church Street, built by Ralph Amyas, deputy steward of the Manor of Wakefield. It has been dated by dendrochronology to 1474. Other old buildings include the tithe barn. The land in Horbury was divided into three great fields, Northfield, Southfield and Westfield, and remains of medieval ridge and furrow of strip cultivation are visible in Carr Lodge Park.

A wooden bridge spanned the River Calder on the road from Wakefield to Huddersfield in the 15th century. Money for its upkeep was left in local wills dated 1404 and 1492, a custom that continued into the 16th century. A stone-arched bridge that replaced the wooden structure in the 17th century lasted until it partly collapsed in 1918. A new bridge was completed in 1930 and was repaired in 1991 at a cost of £2 million. Horbury Bridge was flooded after heavy rain in 1946.

Wool spinning and cloth manufacture were important originally as cottage industries. At the start of the Industrial Revolution steam engines were installed at Race's Mill in Dudfleet and Foster's Mill on Engine Lane in 1795. Resistance to the implementation of new textile machinery and the factory system was shown when Luddites, who blamed the new factories for depriving weavers from earning a living in a time of widespread hunger and poverty, destroyed Fosters Mill.

Albion Mills and Millfield Mills were built in the 1870s. William Sykes's sports goods works, which became part of Slazengers, was established at about this time. Slazenger had four factories which produced sports equipment. Since the factories closed the name is preserved in Slazengers Sports and Social Club, which has facilities and floodlit grounds for many different sporting activities.

Charles Roberts (1831–1892) who described himself as a joiner, moved the Buffer and Wagon Works he had established on Ings Road, Wakefield to a site at Horbury Junction in 1873. Between 1901 and 1956 the company built 110,000 railway wagons of varying types and by 1945 Charles Roberts and Co.'s works covered 45 acres including the adjacent site of the Horbury Junction Iron Company which it had taken over in 1923. During the First World War the firm was among the first to employ women who were employed to forge shell covers. During the Second World War, the wagon works was used for armament manufacture, and made 1,300 Churchill tanks, half a million naval shells and one and a half million trench mortar bombs. The Horbury Junction Iron Company site was used to build tram bodies for Blackpool and Sheffield trams.

The works later became owned by Procor and then Bombardier Inc. The last vehicles constructed at the site were Bombardier Voyager trains, the plant closed in 2005; the engineering company Eddison & Wanless now occupies the site.

In 1905, Richard Sutcliffe (1849–1930), who had worked as part-time manager at Hartley Bank Colliery across the valley in Netherton, opened his Universal Works on the site of the old dye house mill on the Horbury-Wakefield boundary in 1905 and started to manufacture conveyor belts and mining machinery. In 1972 the company employed 742 people at its Horbury site.