Tong Conservation Area 

Tong Conservation Area was originally designated in 1973.  The designation covers virtually the entire village which extends in a linear fashion along Tong Lane, the main thoroughfare. Tong village predates the Norman Conquest and was the seat of Tong Manor between the thirteenth and mid-twentieth century’s.  

The manor remained in the hands of the Tempests, who resisted the expansion and industrialization of the village, for some four hundred years before selling the Hall in 1941. Unusually, a great number of the buildings in the conservation area were built in the eighteenth century including Tong Hall (1702) and the adjacent courtyard (1711) and the school (1736). St James’s Church was built in 1727 by Sir George Tempest of Tong Hall; it replaced an earlier building that had been built in c. 1140 A.D. These buildings used a mixture of red brick and local grit stone, making the conservation area unique in Bradford in terms of materials.

Holmewood

Holmewood is the largest of the new housing estates in Bradford which began to take shape in 1958. St. Christopher's Church in Holmewood was the only real community building on the estate, with the first Sunday worship service taking place on December 21st in a 'Wooden Hut'.  St. Christopher's was to be a very important place for the thousands of early residents in Holmewood.

Tong

Although there is little evidence of any permanent settlement of the area from prehistoric through to Roman times, St James Church provides conclusive evidence of a settlement of some importance at Tong in Saxon times.  Excavations undertaken during the restoration of the church in the 1980s uncovered the fragmentary walls and foundation stones of two earlier buildings contained within the footprint of the remains of a Norman-era church.  St James Church is the only identifiable pre-Conquest church in West Yorkshire and is therefore of considerable historic interest.  Around the time of the Norman invasion, it is known that Tong Manor was farmed and was owned by a Saxon named Stainulf.  As happened across the country after 1066, the Norman invaders knocked down existing churches and built a new place of worship, often on the site of the church they demolished.  By the time of the Doomsday Survey, in 1086, some twenty years after the invasion, Tong Manor was held by Ilbert de Lacy, who is recorded in the survey as holding all of what is now Bradford (excluding Eccleshill).

Asolf, an extensive landowner in West Riding, appears to have been lord of Tong Manor from around 1135 to about 1159 and it is therefore probable that he rebuilt the church in about 1140 on the site of the demolished pre-Conquest church.  Asolf’s son Richard de Tang (c.1130-c.1195) was the first in a line of Lords of Tong who would inhabit Tong Hall and oversee the running of the manor until 1941.  The name Tong comes from the Old English term tang meaning tong or fork and refers to the village’s position on a raised sliver of land between Ringshaw Beck and Cockersdale which converge at the eastern extreme of the manor.  Tong remained in the possession of the de Tangs as an agricultural manor for nine generations until the death of Hugh de Tong in 1445 and the passing of the manor to his grandson, John Mirfield.

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