When we bought our house at the bottom of Halifax Road in Brighouse, my Dad, who had lived in Brighouse as a young child in the 1930s, commented that we had moved to ‘Johnny King Lane’. I was intrigued because none of the local maps I had looked at, nor the census records that I used to research some of the history of our house, included any reference to Johnny King Lane. However, internet searches did eventually turn up the information that I was looking for. Then this weekend a Brighouse resident asked about the history of John King Lane in a Brighouse Facebook group. From that I learned that many Brighouse folk still refer to this part of Halifax Road as ‘John King’.
In the Georgian and Victorian period the plot of land where our house is situated was owned by a local land agent called John King, who had a house here that I believe was called Ganny House. I have deduced this from an 1850s map which labels two houses in this part of Brighouse as Ganny Cottage and Ganny House. The cottage still stands, and of the only two properties on the map that could possibly be associated with the Ganny House label, the other (long since demolished) is shown on other maps as a row of terraced housing. So I believe that it is John King’s House which was called Ganny House. It is the largest house on this map, above and to the right of the name Ganny House.
This name is of particular interest to me because our house was originally built by the gentleman who owned Ganny Mill, a silk mill not far from our house. It turns out the whole part of Brighouse that we live in was associated with the name Ganny, which is thought to be an old field name. In this map from Joseph Horsfall’s 1890s book, ‘History of Brighouse’, the point where the main Brighouse to Elland road passes below John King Lane is marked as ‘Ganny Bar’.
There’s also a paragraph about John King in Horsfall’s book:
It seems the rebuild never got beyond the cellaring, because our house was built around the same time as Horsfall wrote his book.
The only other bit of information I’ve gleaned about John King is that he was known as ‘the cheap will-maker’. As that was a service that was no doubt for the benefit of poorer folk in the area, and knowing that he was a Quaker, I have the impression that he was rather a kindly man. How lovely that his name lives on in a locally remembered placename.
