Data copyright © Ian Sanderson, Wakefield Metropolitan District Council, Historic England unless otherwise stated
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The West Yorkshire Historic Characterisation Project (WYHLC) was undertaken by the West Yorkshire Archaeology Advisory Service (WYAAS) between 2011 and 2017. The project covers the five local authorities which make up the West Yorkshire Region: Bradford, Calderdale, Kirklees, Leeds and Wakefield, and was funded by Historic England (formerly English Heritage).
There were five project objectives:
Digitisation commenced in April 2011, and completed by the end of December 2015. Report writing commenced in January 2016, with report editing and production finalised in January 2017.
Over much of West Yorkshire, areas with rural and urban attributes are not geographically distinct, but are intermingled - the result of industrial development taking place on a base settlement pattern which was predominantly dispersed rather than nucleated. The result is extensive ribbon development along roads and the margins of common land fronting areas which retain primarily rural attributes. This means that West Yorkshire, like some other industrialised sub-regions in the North, required a characterisation methodology which differed from the traditional approach of treating urban and rural areas as distinct entities. The methodology employed during the project drew on those developed for sub-regions such as South Yorkshire and Greater Manchester, which integrated the modelling approach of Historic Landscape Characterisation with that of the Extensive Urban Survey. This enabled the broad-brush approach of historic landscape characterisation to be brought into urban areas, as well as allowing the archaeological potential of rural areas to be considered.