Gildersome
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Gildersome is a village and
civil parish In England, a civil parish is a type of administrative parish used for local government. It is a territorial designation which is the lowest tier of local government. Civil parishes can trace their origin to the ancient system of parishes, w ...
in the
City of Leeds Leeds, also known as the City of Leeds, is a metropolitan borough with City status in the United Kingdom, city status in West Yorkshire, England. The metropolitan borough includes the administrative centre of Leeds and the towns of Farsley, Gar ...
metropolitan borough A metropolitan borough (or metropolitan district) is a type of districts of England, local government district in England. Created in 1974 by the Local Government Act 1972, metropolitan boroughs are defined in English law as metropolitan distr ...
5 miles (7 km) south-west of
Leeds city centre Leeds city centre is the central business district of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It is roughly bounded by the Leeds Inner Ring Road, Inner Ring Road to the north and the River Aire to the south and can be divided into several quarters. A ...
in
West Yorkshire West Yorkshire is a Metropolitan counties of England, metropolitan and Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the Yorkshire and the Humber region of England. It borders North Yorkshire to the north and east, South Yorkshire and De ...
,
England England is a Countries of the United Kingdom, country that is part of the United Kingdom. It is located on the island of Great Britain, of which it covers about 62%, and List of islands of England, more than 100 smaller adjacent islands. It ...
. Glidersome forms part of the
Heavy Woollen District The Heavy Woollen District is a region of textile-focused industrial development in West Yorkshire, England. It acquired the name because of the heavyweight cloth manufactured there from the early 19th century. The district is made up of parts o ...
.


Location

Historically History is the systematic study of the past, focusing primarily on the human past. As an academic discipline, it analyses and interprets evidence to construct narratives about what happened and explain why it happened. Some theorists categ ...
part of the
West Riding of Yorkshire The West Riding of Yorkshire was one of three historic subdivisions of Yorkshire, England. From 1889 to 1974 the riding was an administrative county named County of York, West Riding. The Lord Lieutenant of the West Riding of Yorkshire, lieu ...
, it is situated midway between
Leeds Leeds is a city in West Yorkshire, England. It is the largest settlement in Yorkshire and the administrative centre of the City of Leeds Metropolitan Borough, which is the second most populous district in the United Kingdom. It is built aro ...
,
Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 109,766 in the 2021 census, up from 99,251 in the 2011 census. The city is the administrative centre of the wider Metropolit ...
and
Bradford Bradford is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in West Yorkshire, England. It became a municipal borough in 1847, received a city charter in 1897 and, since the Local Government Act 1972, 1974 reform, the city status in the United Kingdo ...
but is in the LS27 (Leeds) postcode area while the village
telephone numbers A telephone number is the address of a telecommunication endpoint, such as a telephone, in a telephone network, such as the public switched telephone network (PSTN). A telephone number typically consists of a sequence of digits, but histori ...
are "0113", the Leeds prefix. Gildersome was an urban district, established in 1894. In 1937 it was absorbed into the
Municipal Borough of Morley Morley was a local government district in the West Riding of Yorkshire. Apart from the town of Morley, it included Churwell (a separate Local Government District until 1891), East Ardsley (or Ardsley East), West Ardsley, Drighlington and G ...
. In 1974 the borough was abolished and combined with neighbouring authorities in the City of Leeds. Although the village is still classed as part of the Morley urban area in the census, it is technically separate, and is not governed by Morley
Town Council A town council, city council or municipal council is a form of local government for small municipalities. Usage of the term varies under different jurisdictions. Republic of Ireland In 2002, 49 urban district councils and 26 town commissi ...
. In 2004 a civil parish was established and the village now has a parish council. At the 2011 Census the population of this civil parish was 5,804. Gildersome is sits in the Morley North
ward Ward may refer to: Division or unit * Hospital ward, a hospital division, floor, or room set aside for a particular class or group of patients, for example the psychiatric ward * Prison ward, a division of a penal institution such as a pris ...
, which elects three councillors to
Leeds City Council Leeds City Council is the local authority of the City of Leeds in West Yorkshire, England. Leeds has had a council since 1626, which has been reformed on numerous occasions. Since 1974 it has been a metropolitan borough council. It provides the ...
, and the
Morley and Outwood Morley and Outwood was a constituency in West Yorkshire represented in the House of Commons of the UK Parliament. Further to the completion of the 2023 Periodic Review of Westminster constituencies, the seat was abolished. Subject to boundary ...
parliamentary constituency. Gildersome is one of the highest parts of the Leeds district area at 561 feet above sea level (Hart Hill). The
M621 motorway The M621 is a loop of motorway in West Yorkshire, England that takes traffic into central Leeds between the M1 motorway, M1 and M62 motorway, M62 motorways. History The first section of the M621 to open, known at the time as the 'South West Ur ...
begins at
M62 motorway The M62 is a west–east Pennines, trans-Pennine motorway in Northern England, connecting Liverpool and Kingston upon Hull, Hull via Manchester, Bradford, Leeds and Wakefield; of the route Concurrency (road), is shared with the M60 motorway, ...
junction 27 which is Gildersome. The A62 Leeds to
Huddersfield Huddersfield is a town in the Metropolitan Borough of Kirklees in West Yorkshire, England. It is the administrative centre and largest settlement in the Kirklees district. The town is in the foothills of the Pennines. The River Holme's confl ...
(Gelderd Road) also runs by the village.


Amenities

Gildersome has many services such as a library, doctor's, fast food restaurants, laundrette and a small Co-op store. A playground sits next to the library. A war memorial is situated on the village green. Perhaps slightly unusual for a village of its size, it has always had a number of schools, right through its history. At present, there are two primary schools; Gildersome Primary and Birchfield Primary. The schools are both feeder schools to a range of high schools in the area, as the village is allocated centrally between the likes of The Farnley Academy and the Morley schools, Bruntcliffe Academy and The Morley Academy. Gildersome has a largely sporting community, especially within football and cricket sectors. The village team, Gildersome Spurs, trains and plays teams in football from an early age, and holds an annual gala. The cricket club, located at the top of Street Lane, has been successfully operating for decades. In 2007, they broke records, when their junior team played four matches, one in each country in the space of 12 hours, a feat which was recorded by local and national media. In September 2007 Gildersome entered
rugby league Rugby league football, commonly known as rugby league in English-speaking countries and rugby 13/XIII in non-Anglophone Europe, is a contact sport, full-contact sport played by two teams of thirteen players on a rectangular Rugby league playin ...
with a team playing in the
CMS Yorkshire league The Yorkshire Men's League is a summer rugby league competition for amateur teams in Yorkshire. The competition was formed in 2009 as the RLC Yorkshire Premier by splitting the RLC North Premier into two competitions - this and the RLC North ...
Division 4.


Etymology

The name of Gildersome is first attested in 1181, as ''Gildehusum''. The research of the
English Place-Name Society The English Place-Name Society (EPNS) is a learned society concerned with toponomastics and the toponymy of England, in other words, the study of place-names ( toponyms). Its scholars aim to explain the origin and history of the names they st ...
established that the name derives from the
Old Norse Old Norse, also referred to as Old Nordic or Old Scandinavian, was a stage of development of North Germanic languages, North Germanic dialects before their final divergence into separate Nordic languages. Old Norse was spoken by inhabitants ...
words ''gildi'' ('banquet, tax,
guild A guild ( ) is an association of artisans and merchants who oversee the practice of their craft/trade in a particular territory. The earliest types of guild formed as organizations of tradespeople belonging to a professional association. They so ...
') and ''húsum'' ('houses', the
dative In grammar, the dative case (abbreviated , or sometimes when it is a core argument) is a grammatical case used in some languages to indicate the recipient or beneficiary of an action, as in "", Latin for "Maria gave Jacob a drink". In this exampl ...
plural In many languages, a plural (sometimes list of glossing abbreviations, abbreviated as pl., pl, , or ), is one of the values of the grammatical number, grammatical category of number. The plural of a noun typically denotes a quantity greater than ...
form of ''hús'', 'house). Thus the name once meant 'guild-houses'.Harry Parkin, ''Your City's Place-Names: Leeds'', English Place-Name Society City-Names Series, 3 (Nottingham: English Place-Names Society, 2017). This etymology supersedes older guesses, including the 1913 opinion of Armitage Goodall that the first element was the archaic northern English dialect word ''
gill A gill () is a respiration organ, respiratory organ that many aquatic ecosystem, aquatic organisms use to extract dissolved oxygen from water and to excrete carbon dioxide. The gills of some species, such as hermit crabs, have adapted to allow r ...
'' ('stream, ravine, narrow valley'),Armitage Goodall, ''Place-Names of South-West Yorkshire; That Is of So Much of the West Riding As Lies South of the Aire from Keighley Onwards''; 2013 irst published 1913 London, Forgotten Books, pp. 144–45. and the earlier idea that ''Gildersome'' derived from a Dutch place name such as *''Guelderzoom'' referring to immigrants from Guelderland.


History

The first church in the village, Gildersome Baptist Church was constructed in 1707. It was built for public worship with an intended capacity of 250 people. In 2007 there were many celebrations and events to coincide with the 300th anniversary of the original place of worship. In 1866, for a cost of approximately £2,000, a new chapel was built, much larger than the original. It was opened on 2 May 1866, and the original building remains. However, in recent years, the church was redeveloped, with the adjoining halls and facilities being converted into flats. The original hall was renovated, with a new and modern interior and brand new facilities. Through grants, volunteering schemes and assistance from various sources, the graveyard has also been converted into a community garden, which encourages local school children to learn more about the environment and nature. Turton Hall in Gildersome (now three residential dwellings) was a prominent and wealthy school, for higher education pupils, during the 1700s. It is said that preacher
John Wesley John Wesley ( ; 2 March 1791) was an English cleric, Christian theology, theologian, and Evangelism, evangelist who was a principal leader of a Christian revival, revival movement within the Church of England known as Methodism. The societies ...
visited and preached in the dining room. The hall returned to private ownership in 1879, and remains a Grade II listed building, with several TPOs (tree preservation orders) covering the grounds. Gildersome also used to have two fully functioning
railway station Rail transport (also known as train transport) is a means of transport using wheeled vehicles running in railway track, tracks, which usually consist of two parallel steel railway track, rails. Rail transport is one of the two primary means of ...
s. One was on the Great Northern Railway line from
Wakefield Wakefield is a cathedral city in West Yorkshire, England located on the River Calder. The city had a population of 109,766 in the 2021 census, up from 99,251 in the 2011 census. The city is the administrative centre of the wider Metropolit ...
to
Bradford Bradford is a city status in the United Kingdom, city in West Yorkshire, England. It became a municipal borough in 1847, received a city charter in 1897 and, since the Local Government Act 1972, 1974 reform, the city status in the United Kingdo ...
which ran at the turn of the 20th century, and it was located at the crossroads at the top of the village (towards Morley). This station closed in 1962 along with railway station In the recent roundabout replacements a tunnel on the GNR line was uncovered and then resealed. The second railway station was on Rooms Lane and was on the Leeds to Huddersfield LNWR "Leeds New Line" opened in 1900. This station closed in 1923 to passengers. Gildersome has changed beyond recognition in 100 years, when the village was a thriving mining community with many local pits. A lot of the original mining locations remain, such as the 'brownhills', a large area of land which separates Gildersome from neighbouring
Drighlington Drighlington is a village and civil parish in the City of Leeds metropolitan district, West Yorkshire, England. Historic counties of England, Historically part of the West Riding of Yorkshire, the village lies 5 miles (9 km) south-west of ...
. The provisions created for the miners, including the increased number of housing remain today, including the town houses and terraces built on Street Lane. A lot of the land has subsequently been redeveloped. The land on which Mill Lane and its subsequent housing now sits was, as the name suggests, a large industrial area, with Maiden Mills built on the site. Originally, there was a flax mill, but during an incident in 1914, the mill burnt down, and a new one was built. On 4 February 1974, the village and surrounding area gathered widespread national attention, as result of the M62 coach bombing: 12 people including soldiers and members of their families, died in the incident, which the media claimed to be the work of the IRA. In the 1990s, much former industrial land in Gildersome was cleared and re-developed for housing.


Trivia

* Gildersome Primary School's emblem which is placed on the uniforms and school-related products, is a phoenix. The school was initially built in 1984, to educate the pupils of the merging Gildersome Junior School and St Peter's Infant School, allowing children to be taught from reception age, through to 11. However the philosophy behind the phoenix comes from the fact that both schools suffered terrible fires, in the '70s and '80s. The new school was seen as a new beginning, and the phoenix was chosen as an emblem, which remains to this date. A revised edition was designed in 2003, for multimedia purposes. *During the war years, on the land on which the Green Park sits, at the bottom of the Gildersome Primary drive, there was a public air-raid shelter. *
Winston Churchill Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill (30 November 1874 – 24 January 1965) was a British statesman, military officer, and writer who was Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 1940 to 1945 (Winston Churchill in the Second World War, ...
once made a visit to the village, stopping on the boundary between Leeds (city centre) and Morley, where he "meeted and greeted" people near St Bernard's (now on Gelderd Road) *Gildersome gained national widespread attention in 1663, when a foiled plot aimed at taking over the city of Leeds, and other strongholds in the Yorkshire area came to the attention of the public. It is now commonly known as the Farnley Wood Plot, but many of the conspirators came from the Gildersome area. In conjunction with this plot, many people were arrested and held captive at York. Three who managed to escape were brought back to Leeds for immediate execution. Some people go as far to say, that the land on which one of the plotter's house used to stand, along with the original plantains, is now haunted. *Mary Irvine Thompson (1919–2001), first female chartered engineer to be admitted to the
Institution of Structural Engineers The Institution of Structural Engineers is a British professional body for structural engineers. In 2021, it had 29,900 members operating in 112 countries. It provides professional accreditation and publishes a magazine, '' The Structural Eng ...
(1947), started her school education in Gildersome.Electoral register 1921 for her parents William and Annie Irvine, living at West End, Gildersome.


See also

* Listed buildings in Gildersome * M62 coach bombing * Gildersome Baptist Church


References


External links

* {{cite web , url = http://www.genuki.org.uk/big/eng/YKS/WRY/Batley/index.html , title = The Ancient Parish of Batley , publisher =
GENUKI GENUKI is a genealogy web portal, run as a charitable trust. It "provides a virtual reference library of genealogical information of particular relevance to the UK and Ireland". It gives access to a large collection of information, with the emphas ...
, access-date=29 October 2007 Gildersome was in this parish
Gildersome Parish CouncilGildersome Baptist ChurchHistory of Gildersome
City of Leeds Civil parishes in West Yorkshire