The heart of industrial Yorkshire is five towns, each the centre of a county borough comprising the Metropolitan county. Wakefield claims to be the most venerable, the county town of the former West Riding: its medieval church a cathedral; it has Georgian terraced squares and churches; there are ship repairers on the commercial Aire and Calder. But elsewhere are palatial classical mills and town halls in Pennne stone, copied from heroic models in Italy and Greece. Bradford had a famous reputation for stone carved mills and public works through wool making and and weaving before attempting to hide its origins; but the magnificent Saltaire Mills live on, and the Wool Exchange and Florentine Town Hall demonstrate gritty power from spinning and weaving worstead. Leeds is today a cosmopolitan centre of commerce with startling office towers and universities in avant guard styles; here, old brick mills wove cloth and still today make up suits; it rejoices in Cuthbert Broderick's boastful neo-classical Town Hall, Gilbert Scott's Venetian Gothic General Infirmary, Corson's Grand Theatre with fairy tale Gothic, and splendid Gothic churches like Bodley's St Saviour. Halifax rivals Wakefield with its ancient Minster, its palatial Georgian Piece Hall, and famous 17th century Halifax houses where woolmasters organised making woollen cloth before the factory system. Huddersfield also had a cloth hall, part of which is reassembled at the museum at Sir John Ramsden's former house. As lord of the manor he also founded the market. The town's finest architecture is the railway station which John Betjeman described as Britain’s finest; it would be fitting for a duke if placed in a park!
 
Alan Bennett wrote in Keeping On Keeping On  “…West Yorkshire is a notable addition to the new Heritage Shell Guide Series - full of good things …so much odd information and pleasure!...it’s a lovely book !”