Bronte museum's first home

By Alistair Shand .
THE Bronte Society, founded in 1893, housed its first museum on the upper floor of this prominent building at the top of Haworth Main Street, formerly the Yorkshire Penny Bank and now the Tourist Information Centre, before moving into the Parsonage in 1928.

The building at the top of Haworth Main Street where the Bronte Society housed its first museum. From 1889 there had been a privately-run Museum of Bronte Relics at Brown's Temperance Hotel and Refreshment Rooms in Main Street, an enterprise which also catered for picnic parties and sold Haworth views. Bronte tourism was getting into its stride by then, with hyperbolic touting of "the wildest and bleakest moors of Yorkshire" and a little village "consisting of a church and a few grey stone cottages", although one guide of 1899 more realistically called Haworth "an ever-expanding colony bisected by a railway". Advertisers played on the Brontes. The Black Bull Hotel was "close to the church and Bronte Museum", the King's Arms "opposite Bronte Museum and church" and the White Lion "next door to Bronte Museum". Notice, on the left side of the antique shop, the sign pointing towards Colne – a reminder of the narrow corners the traffic negotiated before the opening of the Main Street by-pass in 1974. The photograph has been supplied by Mr Kevin Seaton, of Shann Lane, Keighley. thetelegraphandargus