Mrs Susan Bannon’s recollections of Croft Street, off Manchester Road, and the places nearby, sent me to look at maps of that part of Bradford, one published in 1903 and the other 70 years later.

Mrs Bannon, born in 1928, recalls Campbell’s furniture shop on Croft Street, the Bradford Hospital Fund office on Nelson Street and a blacksmith’s forge.

The blacksmith, she said, “serviced all the railway horses. On May Day, what a sight, all trimmed up, the horses and carts, coal carts.”

The railway horses Mrs Bannon remembers worked in the Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway goods yard, a huge assembly of sheds, engine houses, railway tracks, freight wagons and cellars, adjacent to Croft Street.

This amazing place, which featured in a Remember When? spread on October 24 last year, was closed in October 1962 and remained vacant for more than eight years until it was demolished and cleared to make way for the new bus and train Interchange in the 1970s.

Huge bales of wool were stored and moved from time to time in the yard’s warehouse. Before motor transport, these bales were delivered from mills by horse and cart.

There is a photograph of Bradford’s last mill horse, Duke, dressed for May Day, delivering bales to the yard before it closed.