Bradford’s past contains plenty of worthy sons and daughters whose achievements earned them a place in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography.

Scientists, industrialists, clergymen, social reformers, writers, artists musicians, entertainers, sportsmen, politicians, trade unionists….They were drawn from just about every corner of life.

Not all were born in Bradford, but they all made enough of a mark here to qualify for the title of “Bradfordian”.

James Ogden has collated details of 200 of them (all now dead) for a long and fascinating feature in the latest edition of The Bradford Antiquary, the journal of the Bradford Historical and Antiquarian Society.

That list includes a few additions of his own who for some reason didn’t make it into the dictionary – among them architects Lockwood and Mawson, who designed half of Victorian Bradford (including the building in which these words are being written). How could they have been left out?

There’s plenty of other material to interest and enlighten in the 2008 edition of the Antiquary. Anne Wilkinson writes about the origins and organisation of that musical institution the Bradford Subscription Concerts; Ken Kenzie looks at the more modern history of the Bradford Memory Bank; Frank Dickinson explores the story of the Scar Hill Toll House and Astrid Hansen goes on a tour of local plaques and tablets.

Michael Baumber relives a year in the life of an eighteenth century handloom weaver with the help of the diary for 1794-95 of 18-year-old Abraham Shackleton, son of a partner in the Brownend cotton-spinning mill at Laycock, near Keighley and Caroline Brown chronicles a century in the life of Ilkley’s Carnegie Library… And there’s plenty more of strong local historical interest in this sturdy paperback volume.

Copies of The Bradford Antiquary cost £5 each and are available from honorary editor Bob Duckett, 22 Holden Lane, Baildon, Shipley, BD17 6HZ (tel: 01274 592928; e-mail: duckettbob@yahoo.co.uk).