OTLEY CONSERVATION AREA
Historical development and changing character of the conservation area
In the Anglo-Saxon period, Otley was the centre of a large landholding or estate belonging to the archbishops of York. Along the river Wharfe, the estate ran from Pool in the south-east, to Addingham in the north-west; further holdings extended southwards from Otley, through the gap in the high ground at Menston and down to the river Aire. The estate may have originated in a 7th-century grant to St Wilfrid, though it could even have been an older land unit: the name 'Chevin' is of British derivation and means 'under the ridge'. It has been argued that it was the centre of an estate before the arrival of the Anglo-Saxons.
Whatever the status of Otley at this early period, it was certainly a place of importance by the later 8th century. The parish church of All Saints contains an important group of Anglo-Saxon carved stone crosses, the earliest thought to date to around AD 780. The context of the crosses is likely to have been a monastic community that lay at the centre of this ecclesiastical estate, presumably on or around the site of All Saints and its graveyard. Architecturally, the earliest parts of All Saints seem to date to the 12th century, but the dimensions of its nave may indicate an earlier, Anglo-Saxon date for much of the present building, even though there are no visible pre-Conquest architectural features.
From around the time of the Norman Conquest, the archbishops are known to have had a manor house some distance to the north of the church, on a spur overlooking the river Wharfe just above the medieval river crossing. A range of stone buildings excavated there in the 1960s may have been first erected in the 11th century, and were rebuilt during the course of the Middle Ages. Traces of earlier timber structures were also uncovered; these probably dated to around the time when the Anglo-Saxon crosses were erected. Further foundations had been uncovered when the present Manor House had been built in 1783, and an earlier document indicates that some manorial buildings lay adjacent to the 17th-century grammar school. All this indicates an extensive manorial enclosure on the west side of Bridge Street.
Major Anglo-Saxon ecclesiastical centres often became the focus of early trading and industrial communities, and Otley was probably one of these. Settlement at this period may have been to the east of the churchyard, in what became the Bondgate area, and/or along the lane between the church and the manorial enclosure, later Kirkgate.
The major urban development of Otley, the phase of growth that provided the components of the modern town plan, came in the first half of the 13th century. The archbishops, like many other great landowners, created new towns in order to increase their revenues: they could levy tolls, fines and rents on the greatly increased level of commercial activity. In order to attract merchants and tradespeople, they laid out plots for new dwellings at Otley and offered them with 'burgage' tenure, absolving prospective tenants from most of the agricultural services and dues normally required of manorial tenants, and giving the new community a measure of self-government. The detailed record of Otley's urbanisation has not survived, but key stages in the process towards it were the granting of a fair and a market in 1227, and the building (or rebuilding) of the bridge across the Wharfe in 1228.
The new town was laid out along a funnel-shaped area of 'green' between the arable open fields to the north and south, and the pre-existing settlement to the west. The burgage plots along the north side of Boroughgate and the south side of Walkergate were probably taken out of the open-field strips on each side of the green; Kirkgate was probably developed on the west end of the green itself. Bondgate, east of the church, was a subsidiary settlement for the manorial tenants who did not have 'burgage' privileges, and who continued to undertake agricultural duties on the archbishop's own lands. Beyond Cross Green, the market area at the west end of the borough, a leper hospital was founded by the side of the routeway to Harewood.
It is probable that most, if not all, these streets or 'gates' were occupied by housing by the early 14th century. A document of that period records over 120 burgage holdings, occupied by more than 80 tenants. Add to these another 17 bond tenements and further cottage holdings, and it is clear that by that period the town must have contained over a hundred households. There may already have been some development in the large, funnel-shaped green and market place to accommodate some of these families.
Records of the mid-16th-century parish have led some researchers to estimate that the population of the town at that period numbered between 400 and 600 persons. This suggests that the size of Elizabethan Otley was little greater than it had been in the early 14th century. Indeed, there are grounds for supposing a decline in its size in the intervening years. Otley was referred to in 1718 as a "small village" (by the surveyor, Warburton), although in 1769 the poet Gray calls it "a large airy town with clean but low rustic buildings, and a bridge over the Wharfe". A map of the town dating to 1783 indicates little further expansion beyond the 14th-century framework, except along Westgate.
A cotton mill was established on the Wharfe in the late 18th-century as well as a concern for the weaving of calicoes. These businesses drew in some one hundred work people. Later the trades of woolcombing and worsted spinning were introduced into the town. Tanning, currying and leather dressing also came to be important industries in the 19th-century. The introduction of the railway in 1865 enhanced the town's economic development but "came too late to materially alter the traditional appearance of many buildings" (P.Wood, 1998 Walk around Otley). However, the pre-eminent industry by 1900 was the printing machinery trade, with over 2,000 employed in seven machine shops.
One of Otley's most famous sons is Thomas Chippendale, the famous cabinetmaker who was baptised at Otley Church on 5th June 1718. The son of an Otley carpenter, he is believed to have been born in a cottage on the junction of Boroughgate and Wesley Street. Nationally he is revered as the 'Shakespeare' of English cabinet-makers (C.Gilbert, 1978 The Life and Work of Thomas Chippendale); a Chippendale Society was established in Otley to further the study of his work. Wharfedale is known as 'Chippendale' country in the same way that the moors around Haworth are famous as 'Bronte' country. Appropriately there are plaques in the town marking the supposed sites of his birth, his cottage where he lived (though there is no documentary evidence to support this), and a modern statue of him fronting Manor Square (which is apparently not based on any existing representation of him; pers. comm. P.Wood).
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