Category: Yorks County Towns

In popular culture, ‘Yorkshire’ means ‘the West Riding’. If it’s a cliché, a trope or a standing joke, it’s probably going to be from the industrial west of the county: ee-bah-gum, trouble at t’mill, brass bands, see-all-hear-all-say-nowt, Geoff Boycott and Fred Trueman, Norah Batty’s stockings, Yorkshire Airlines, Four Yorkshiremen Talking… The itchy blanket of the…

The East Riding is Yorkshire’s overlooked third. Largely flat, gentle farmland, it’s a Schubert song alongside the Wagnerian grandeur of the North Riding; a trowel compared with the colossal factories and mills of the West Riding. But it’s where I come from and I love it, and the small-scale, intimate dry valleys of the Wolds…

The North Riding of Yorkshire is why it’s dubbed God’s Own Country, much to the irritation of God, I expect. (During the pandemic’s restrictions it was joked that He must be in Yorkshire, because He’d be working from home.) It’s the third of the county with all the dramatic, TV-friendly scenery: the Dales and the…