Wetherby ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the City of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It is close to West Yorkshire county's border with North Yorkshire and lies approximately from Leeds city centre, from York and from Harrogate. The town stands on the River Wharfe and, for centuries, it has been a crossing place and staging post on the Great North Road midway between London and Edinburgh.
Wetherby Bridge, which spans the River Wharfe, is a Scheduled Ancient Monument and a Grade II listed structure. The course of the Old Great North Road passes through the town and, as result of its situation on the road, as well as being a major cattle droving route from Scotland to London, many coaching inns were established in Wetherby which are still used by travellers today.
The town lies in the Wetherby ward of Leeds City Council and the Wetherby and Easingwold parliamentary constituency. It was listed in the 2018 Sunday Times report on the Best Places to Live in Northern England.
Toponymy Wetherby is first attested in the Domesday Book of 1086, as Wedrebi. The name derives from the Old Norse words veðr ("wether, castrated male sheep", in its genitive singular form veðrar) and bý ("farmstead, village"). Thus the name once meant "wether's farmstead".The Cambridge Dictionary of English Place-Names, Based on the Collections of the English Place-Name Society, ed. by Victor Watts (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), s.v. WETHERBY. .Harry Parkin, Your City's Place-Names: Leeds, English Place-Name Society City-Names Series, 3 (Nottingham: English Place-Name Society, 2017), p. 102. .
History
Historically, Wetherby was a part of the Claro Wapentake, as part of the parish of Spofforth, within the West Riding of Yorkshire.
In the 12th and 13th centuries, the Knights Templar, and later the Knights Hospitallers, were granted land and properties in Yorkshire. The local preceptory founded in 1217 was at Ribston Park. In 1240, the Knights Templar were granted by Royal Charter of Henry III the right to hold a market in WetherbyWetherby & District Historical Society (1995). Wetherby. The Archive Photographs Series. Stroud: The Chalfont Publishing Company. (known then as Werreby) on Thursdays and a yearly fair was permitted lasting three days over the day of St James the Apostle.
From 1318 to 1319, the North of England suffered many raids from the Scots. After the Battle of Bannockburn, Wetherby was burned and many people were taken and killed. According to the blue plaque at the entrance to the lane, Scott Lane could be named after the Scottish raiders in 1318 or the 18th-century drovers who used Wetherby as a watering place.
In the English Civil War in 1644, before marching to Tadcaster and on to Marston Moor, the Parliamentarians spent two days in Wetherby joining forces with the Scots.
In the heyday of the coaching era, Wetherby had up to forty inns and alehouses. The first recorded mail coach arrived in Wetherby in 1786.
In 1824, William Cavendish, 6th Duke of Devonshire sold the town of Wetherby (except one house) to finance work at Chatsworth. Wetherby provides the setting for the novel Oldbury (1869) by Annie Keary.
20th century
During the First World War, many Wetherby men served with either the 5th or 9th Battalion, West Yorkshire Regiment, which had great losses in Flanders. A war memorial designed by E. F. Roslyn was dedicated on 22 April 1922.
In 1918, residents contributed to support the crew of the HMS Wetherby despite hardship and shortages caused by the war.
During the Second World War, nearby RAF Tockwith was renamed RAF Marston Moor to avoid confusion with RAF Topcliffe. Part of the airfield is now a driver training centre and the old control tower is used as the offices. Parts of the runways can still be seen. Clark Gable was stationed at Marston Moor, during the Second World War, as a member of the USAAF ground staff, with the rank of captain. He was transferred to RAF Polebrook in Northamptonshire. Adolf Hitler offered a reward to anyone who was able to catch the airman. Group Captain Leonard Cheshire was stationed at Marston Moor for a short while before leaving to become commander of the 617 Dam Buster squadron.
Wetherby had the only stone frigate north of London, built on Hallfield Lane in 1942 (it later became the local secondary school), named in turn; HMS Cabot, Demetrius, Rodney and Ceres. The base was closed in 1958 and transferred to Chatham.
Throughout the 1960s, the town council deliberated over how best to enlarge the town centre to cope with the needs of a growing population and to provide the town with a purpose built supermarket. Plans were put forward to enlarge the town over the ings, or to develop the town centre into a pedestrian precinct. In the end, it was decided to build a purpose built shopping precinct, which was built in the 1970s and underwent a significant redevelopment throughout 2003. By 2006, the remaining open parts of the Horsefair Centre were enclosed under a glass canopy roof.
Governance
Since 2024, Wetherby has been in the Wetherby and Easingwold constituency, having previously been in the abolished Elmet and Rothwell constituency. The town's MP is Alec Shelbrooke, a Conservative, who has his constituency offices in the town. Wetherby is an electoral ward of Leeds City Council and has a town council responsible for amenities, such as parks.
The coat of arms transferred over from the former Wetherby Rural District Council; it was the first such arms to be granted by the College of Arms to a rural district council, on 7 January 1938.
Crime and law enforcement West Yorkshire Police have a station in Boston Road.
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Geography Divisions and suburbs
Ainsty is in the north of Wetherby, off the B1224 Deighton Road. Its earliest buildings date from the 1940s, made up of council and private housing. Much of the area was built by developer Norman Ashton in the 1960s. Hallfield, in the south-east, is a large council estate and has some houses built by the prison service and some sheltered housing. The area is home to Wetherby High School, St James' Primary School, the cemetery, the Church on the Corner and Mason House Community Centre. A new medical centre has been built on the edge of the estate on the site of the demolished Hallfield Mansion. Micklethwaite was a village in its own right, but its identity as a separate area has disappeared since the Micklethwaite Farm's buildings were demolished in the 2000s and replaced by 150 dwellings known as Micklethwaite. It is situated south of the River Wharfe and contains the police station, magistrates court, the Mercure Hotel and the town's leisure centre and swimming baths. Deighton Bar is situated in the north-east, bordering Ainsty and Sandbeck and the village of Kirk Deighton in North Yorkshire, as is one street in Deighton Bar, Autumn Avenue. The oldest houses are in a row of terrace houses on Deighton Road. The area is home to Deighton Gates primary school between Ainsty and Deighton Bar. Most housing was built in the late 1970s by Barratt Developments. Barleyfields is a residential area of housing in central Wetherby. Its oldest houses are large Victorian terraces on Sandringham Terrace and the former quarry workers' cottages behind Prospect Villas. The area is situated in the middle of a large triangular dismantled railway junction. It is home to St Joseph's Primary School, Crossley Street Primary School and Barleyfields Community Centre. Sandbeck is home to the Sandbeck Industrial Estate, some 1960s Norman Ashton houses and some 1970s council houses. Linton Park View is an affluent area of private houses, mostly built in the 1970s between Spofforth Hill and Linton Lane in the north-west of Wetherby. Spofforth Hill, named after the road that passes through it, is an affluent area off the A661. It contains many large detached houses from Victorian times onwards. In the 1980s and 1990s, the area was expanded after Shepherd Homes built a housing estate on former agricultural land called the Glebe Field Estate.
Weather and climate
Wetherby has a cool, fairly moist climate with changeable weather year-round. Liquid equivalent precipitation totals about 630mm per year and is fairly well distributed through the seasons.
Cloudy weather tends to predominate, but settled, sunny spells occur at times.
Winter temperatures average just above freezing for lows, with highs about 5–9 °C.
Frost and snow are not uncommon, but are rarely severe or prolonged. Temperatures very rarely drop as low as −10 °C.
Summers are mild, with lows generally 10–15 °C and highs of 15–25 °C, with a few hot days approaching 30 °C.
Demography
According to the 2001 UK Census, Wetherby had a population of 11,155 and the wider Wetherby ward had a population of 26,473. By the time of the 2011 census, the population of the town had fallen to 10,772. Since this was taken, the immediate town area has grown considerably. 150 new dwellings were built in one development in Micklethwaite, then a further 20 were added, flats have also appeared at the former Motorworld, La Locanda Restaurant, Deighton Road car garage, Fields Works and the cattle market. In the late 2010s, two new large scale greenfield housing developments started to be developed; one in the Sandbeck area and another in the Spofforth Hill area.
Economy
The Wharfedale Brewery became Oxley's mineral water factory during the inter-war years. It was demolished in the 1950s and redeveloped as the West Yorkshire Road Car Company bus depot and bus station; it has been further redeveloped to include shops, offices and a restaurant. The site of the watermill, by the weir, is now occupied by riverside flats.
Wetherby has a manufacturing presence in the town and on the Thorp Arch Trading Estate. Many residents work in Leeds or on the Sandbeck industrial estate, major retailers in the town centre or at Thorp Arch. Large employers include the British Library, Morrisons, Goldenfry Foods and Moores Furniture.
2017 saw the return of brewing to Wetherby, when the Wetherby Brew Company established a new microbrewery and taproom on the York Road Industrial Estate.
Historic public houses
In its heyday, Wetherby had seventeen pubs in its town centre. Only eleven now remain, of which ten are still open. The town's oldest surviving pub, the Brunswick Hotel, closed in 2003 and reopened as Harris' Bar; in 2012, it reopened again as The Brunswick after refurbishment by Enterprise Inns. The Three Legs public house closed in 2007 and became bar Thr3, Wetherby's first non smoking pub.
During the Second World War, the Angel public house served German and Italian prisoners of war from the nearby camps and, being the only pub in the town to do so, attracted some controversy as a result.
Present day
Goldenfry, which started as a fish and chip shop but which now makes other products including own-brand gravy for every UK supermarket, is situated on Sandbeck Way. Inspirepac has a factory on Sandbeck Lane.
The ICC Group is a multi national UK IT reseller and service provider, which was founded in 1998; it has its HQ at Sandbeck Lane. Supporting over 10% of the FTSE100, it specialises in HP/IBM and Dell products and associated IT services.
Proactis, a leading modular Source-to-Pay solutions provider, has been in based in Wetherby since 1996. Despite transitioning to a remote first workforce in 2020, the company still retains a large office in the town centre.