11 Things Yorkshire Gave the World (And Rarely Gets the Credit For)

The man who ended the British slave trade was born here. The ships that mapped Australia were built here. Two of the most read novels in the English language were written on a Yorkshire moor. Yorkshire’s contribution to history, art, and the contents of your kitchen cupboard is longer than most people realise.

Yorkshire is not a county that tends to shout about itself. It has a reputation for directness and practicality, which has served it well for centuries. It has also meant that some of the most consequential things ever produced here have been filed under somebody else’s name, or quietly absorbed into the national story without full acknowledgement.

This article corrects the record on 11 things Yorkshire gave the world.

Region: Yorkshire (East, West, and North)

Best for: History, art, literature, food, science, heritage

Getting there: Direct rail services run from London King’s Cross to Leeds (about 2 hours 15 minutes), York (under 2 hours), and Hull (around 3 hours). For Haworth and the Dales, a car gives the most flexibility. Check timetables at nationalrail.co.uk.

William Wilberforce Ended the British Slave Trade

Hull does not always receive its due as one of England’s most historically significant cities. It should. William Wilberforce was born in Hull in 1759 and became the MP for Kingston upon Hull at 21. He went on to lead the parliamentary campaign to abolish the transatlantic slave trade for more than two decades.

On 23 February 1807, a bill to abolish the slave trade in the British West Indies passed in the House of Commons by 283 votes to 16. Wilberforce sat in the chamber as the result was read. Members turned to him and cheered. He wept.

Wilberforce did not stop there. He continued campaigning against slavery itself until the Slavery Abolition Act passed its final reading in the Commons on 26 July 1833. He died three days later on 29 July, having heard the news but before the Act received Royal Assent in August. He was buried in Westminster Abbey.

The legal framework that dismantled the largest forced labour system in human history was built largely by a man from Hull.

The Wilberforce House Museum in Hull occupies his childhood home and holds one of the most significant collections of anti-slavery material in Britain.

Worth Knowing: Wilberforce’s home city was also one of the most active ports in the transatlantic trade. His campaign had a direct economic cost to Hull’s merchants. He pursued it anyway.

The Ships That Mapped the World Were Built in Whitby

Captain James Cook was born in 1728 in Marton, a village in the North Riding of Yorkshire that is now part of Middlesbrough. He served his maritime apprenticeship in Whitby under the merchant John Walker, learning seamanship on the coal runs along the northeast coast.

All four of Cook’s major voyage ships were Whitby-built colliers. The HMB Endeavour, which carried him to Tahiti, New Zealand, and the eastern coast of Australia in 1770, was a Whitby vessel. So were Resolution, Discovery, and Adventure. Whitby colliers were chosen because their flat-bottomed hulls could navigate shallow coastal waters and be beached for repairs, which mattered enormously in unmapped oceans.

Cook’s voyages produced the first accurate charts of the Pacific, the first European contact with the eastern coast of Australia, and the first circumnavigation of Antarctica. The tools that made it possible were built on the Yorkshire coast.

The Captain Cook Memorial Museum occupies the house where Cook lodged during his apprenticeship in Whitby. The harbour still gives a clear sense of the working port he would have known.

Worth Knowing: Cook was never knighted, despite the scale of his achievements.

Leeds Put Steam on the Rails 17 Years Before Stephenson’s Rocket

George Stephenson’s Rocket wins most of the credit for the steam railway age. It was tested on the Liverpool-Manchester line in 1829 and became the defining image of railway progress. But the first commercial railway to successfully operate steam locomotives was in Leeds, from 1812, seventeen years earlier.

The Middleton Railway had existed since 1758 as a wagonway carrying coal into Leeds. In 1812, engineer Matthew Murray of Holbeck built a steam locomotive called Salamanca for the line. It was the first commercially successful steam locomotive in the world. The world’s first regular professional train driver, James Hewitt, worked on this line in Leeds.

The Middleton Railway still operates today as a heritage railway run entirely by volunteers, making it one of the oldest continuously working railways on earth.

Worth Knowing: Salamanca used a rack-and-pinion system because engineers of the time doubted that smooth wheels on smooth rails could provide enough grip to haul a load. Stephenson’s later work proved they could, but the commercially proven case for steam locomotion was first made in Leeds.

Three of the Most Important Novels in English Were Written on a Yorkshire Moor

In 1847, three sisters living in a parsonage in the village of Haworth, West Yorkshire, published three novels that have never been out of print. Charlotte Brontë published Jane Eyre. Emily Brontë published Wuthering Heights. The following year, Anne Brontë published The Tenant of Wildfell Hall.

The three books are regularly cited as among the most significant works in English. Jane Eyre has been adapted for film and television more than 40 times. Wuthering Heights is taught in schools across the world and remains one of the most recognised titles in literary history. The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, which dealt with domestic abuse and alcoholism at a time when such subjects were considered unfit for fiction, was the most radical of the three.

All three were written in Haworth, in the same building that now houses the Brontë Parsonage Museum. Patrick Brontë had moved the family there in 1820. The moors above the village appear throughout the work as a setting, a mood, and a character in their own right.

Worth Knowing: The sisters initially published under male pseudonyms: Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell. The literary establishment of the time was reluctant to take women seriously as novelists.

Things Yorkshire Gave the World: Two of the Greatest Sculptors of the 20th Century

Barbara Hepworth was born in Wakefield in 1903. Henry Moore was born in Castleford in 1898. Both attended the Leeds School of Art. Both went on to become internationally recognised as among the most important sculptors of the 20th century.

Hepworth is credited with introducing the pierced form into abstract sculpture, the technique of carving holes through the main body of a piece to create a relationship between the solid mass and the surrounding space. Moore adopted and developed the same approach, and the two remained influential to each other’s work throughout their careers.

Moore’s large-scale bronze figures became defining images of post-war British art and culture. Hepworth was appointed Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1963. Her work is held in permanent collections across the world.

The Hepworth Wakefield, opened in 2011 in the city of her birth, holds the world’s most significant collection of her work.

Worth Knowing: Hepworth’s Yorkshire landscape directly shaped her artistic vision. Her father drove her across the county for his work as a civil engineer, and those journeys over the hills and dales remained a reference point throughout her career.

David Hockney Came From Bradford

David Hockney was born in Bradford in 1937 and is widely regarded as one of the most significant British artists of the 20th century. In 2018, his painting Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures) sold at auction for 90.3 million dollars, breaking the record for the highest price achieved by a living artist at that time.

His work spans Pop Art, the California swimming pool paintings that became cultural landmarks, and a major series of large-scale Yorkshire landscape paintings made on return visits to the Wolds and Dales between 2005 and 2013. Those Yorkshire works, painted in the county where he grew up, are among the most ambitious of his career.

Bradford’s Cartwright Hall Art Gallery holds a permanent collection of his work.

Worth Knowing: Hockney spoke at length about the quality of light in Yorkshire, distinct from that in California or London. He returned to paint the Wolds each year for several years.

Yorkshire Made the Chocolate You Have in Your Pocket

Two of the most significant chocolate manufacturing companies in British history both operated out of Yorkshire.

Rowntree’s, founded in York in 1862, produced Kit Kat in 1935, Aero in 1935, and Smarties in 1937. At its height, the company employed thousands of York workers. Terry’s, also of York, produced the Chocolate Orange and the All Gold collection. Between them, the two companies have created products now sold in dozens of countries and consumed by millions of people who have never heard of either company by name.

Nestlé acquired Rowntree’s in 1988. The Terry’s factory in York closed in 2005. The brands survived the transfer.

York’s Chocolate Story tells the full history of both companies on King’s Square in York, close to the sites of the original factories.

Yorkshire Grew Most of the World’s Forced Rhubarb

Between a nine-square-mile patch of West Yorkshire defined by the towns of Wakefield, Morley, and Rothwell, a peculiar agricultural industry took hold in the 19th century and eventually dominated global production. In the 1960s, this area supplied over 90 per cent of the world’s forced rhubarb.

Forced rhubarb is grown in heated sheds in complete darkness. The plants are transferred inside after two years of outdoor growth in frost. The sudden warmth triggers rapid growth. The stalks that emerge are more tender and sweeter-flavoured than outdoor rhubarb. Growers check on progress by candlelight only, because even artificial light can interfere with the growth cycle. The rhubarb grows so fast in the sheds that, in quiet conditions, you can reportedly hear it.

At peak production, trainloads of rhubarb left the area nightly on what became known as the Rhubarb Express. In 2010, Yorkshire Forced Rhubarb was awarded Protected Designation of Origin status by the European Commission, placing it alongside Champagne and Parma ham as products legally defined by their place of origin.

Worth Knowing: Rhubarb is not native to Yorkshire. It was originally imported from Siberia and northern China, which is precisely why the cold, wet winters of West Yorkshire suit it so well.

Yorkshire Invented the Yorkshire Pudding (Obviously)

The dish existed earlier under different names, but the first published recipe to use the name Yorkshire Pudding appeared in Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery Made Plain and Easy in 1747. An earlier recipe in The Whole Duty of a Woman, printed in 1737, described the same basic technique but called it “dripping pudding.” Glasse gave it its county name, and it stuck.

Traditional Yorkshire pudding is batter, fat, and heat. The batter goes into a hot, dripping pan, and the oven does the rest. In the West Riding, it was historically served before the main course with gravy, to fill the stomach and reduce the amount of meat required per head. This was practical rather than culinary, born of industrial frugality.

The Royal Society of Chemistry published a position statement in 2008: a Yorkshire pudding less than four inches tall is not a Yorkshire pudding.

The Yorkshire Terrier Came from the Textile Mills

In the 1800s, workers from Scotland came to Yorkshire’s textile mills, bringing small terrier dogs bred to catch rats. Over several decades, crossbreeding between these Scottish terriers and local breeds produced a distinct type: small and bold, with a silky blue-and-tan coat suited to working in close quarters.

A dog of the type was shown at a bench show in 1861, recorded as a “broken-haired Scotch Terrier.” The name Yorkshire Terrier was first used in 1870, after a writer in The Field magazine argued they ought no longer be called Scotch Terriers but Yorkshire Terriers, for having been so improved there. The Kennel Club registered the breed formally in 1874.

From mill rat-catcher to one of the most popular dog breeds in the world. The Yorkshire Terrier is now kept in millions of homes across Europe, North America, and Asia, most of which have no rats, no mills, and no connection to the county that produced them.

The World’s First Film Was Shot in a Leeds Garden

On 14 October 1888, Louis Le Prince filmed his family walking in a garden in Roundhay, Leeds. The footage lasted 2.11 seconds at 12 frames per second. It is the oldest surviving motion picture in history. Le Prince had been developing his single-lens camera through years of work in Leeds, and had also filmed trams crossing Leeds Bridge shortly after the Roundhay footage.

He disappeared without explanation in September 1890 while travelling by train in France, before he could publicly file his patents. His luggage vanished with him. Nobody was ever found. The inventors who followed, most notably Edison and the Lumiere brothers, claimed the territory he had been about to occupy.

The National Science and Media Museum in Bradford holds the original footage. A plaque marks Oakwood Grange in Roundhay, where the film was shot.

Practical Tips

• The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Haworth is open year-round. Check current opening times and admission at bronte.org.uk.
• The Hepworth Wakefield is free to enter. Open Tuesday to Sunday. Check hepworthwakefield.org for current exhibitions.
• Wilberforce House Museum in Hull is free to enter. Part of the wider Hull Museums network at hullmuseums.co.uk.
• The Middleton Railway in Leeds runs steam-hauled services on weekends and bank holidays. Check middletonrailway.org.uk for the current timetable.
• York’s Chocolate Story runs guided tours daily from 10am. Book ahead at yorkschocolatestory.com.
• Use the AllTrails app for walking routes around Haworth and the surrounding moors.

Responsible Visiting

Haworth gets very busy in summer, particularly at weekends. The village has limited parking. Arriving early in the morning, or travelling by train to Keighley and taking the Worth Valley Railway to Haworth, offers a better experience and avoids the worst of the congestion. The moors above the village are open-access land, but the weather can change quickly. Boots and layers are essential year-round.

Reader Q&A

What is Yorkshire most famous for producing?

Yorkshire’s most globally significant contributions include the campaign to abolish the British slave trade (William Wilberforce, Hull), the ships that mapped the Pacific and Australia (Whitby), the first commercial steam railway (Leeds, 1812), the Brontë novels (Haworth), and two of the 20th century’s greatest sculptors in Hepworth and Moore.

What food did Yorkshire invent?

Yorkshire’s most famous food contribution is the Yorkshire pudding, so named in Hannah Glasse’s Art of Cookery in 1747. The county also developed forced rhubarb in the Rhubarb Triangle near Wakefield and was home to Rowntree’s, who produced Kit Kat, Aero, and Smarties in York.

What dog breed comes from Yorkshire?

The Yorkshire Terrier was developed in the textile mills of West Yorkshire in the 19th century from Scottish working terriers brought south by mill workers. The name Yorkshire Terrier was first used in 1870, and the Kennel Club registered the breed in 1874.

Why is Yorkshire called God’s Own County?

The phrase has been in use for well over a century and refers to the quality and variety of Yorkshire’s landscape. The county contains three national parks, an extensive coastline, the Vale of York, and the Wolds. No single origin for the phrase has been confirmed, but it has persisted because people keep finding it accurate.

Where to Stay

The Old White Lion Hotel, Haworth. A 300-year-old coaching inn at the top of Haworth’s Main Street, a short walk from the Brontë Parsonage. Rooms above one of the village’s oldest pubs.

The Grand, York, York. The county’s only five-star hotel, housed in the former North Eastern Railway headquarters, is central to York’s chocolate history and the city’s wider offering.

Yorkshire’s record speaks for itself. The county abolished the slave trade, mapped the Pacific, put steam on rails before anyone else, and gave the world two of the most read novels ever written, all without making too much of a fuss about it.

For more history across Britain, explore the Secret Britain history archive. For ideas across the county today, our guide to family days out in Yorkshire covers the wider region.