IN his latest look back at old Bradford pubs, Paul Jennings - author of The Local: A History of The English Pub - explores the history of the King's Arms in Great Horton.

Many readers will recall drinking in the King's Arms over the years. But did you know that magistrates' sessions and inquests were once held there?

"I am sometimes asked which is, or was, as so many have gone, the oldest pub in Bradford. It was never easy to give a straight answer as one might be referring either to the surviving building or merely the name. Thus the Pack Horse in Westgate was certainly an old name but the building which latterly retained it was only erected in the 1960s.

With the King's Arms at Great Horton, however, we have both a name and a building of some age. For as the pub still shows above the entrance, it was built in 1739 by GB, one Gilbert Brooksbank, who local historian William Cudworth tells us in his Rambles Round Horton was a member of an important family in Horton at that time. The family were large landowners and responsible for building several houses.

When it was later sold in 1889 to the brewers Joseph Stocks and Company of Shibden Head it was indeed described as 'the oldest inn in the district'. In its early days it was an important staging post for travellers and their horses from Bradford to Halifax before beginning the long ascent towards Scarlet Heights and the village which later came to be called Queensbury. To this end it offered stabling and a coach house and also had a slaughter house and butcher's shop attached.

It was an important centre of village life, as Great Horton was then separate both physically and administratively from Bradford. In addition to offering refreshment and relaxation, it provided a setting for activities no longer associated with pubs but which were once commonly held in them. These included magistrates' petty sessions and coroners' inquests: one of the latter for example in 1826 on a suicide who had done so in a fit of depression brought on by his unemployment.

Come election time too, pubs like the King's Arms also had an important role to play in the days when it was customary to seek to persuade voters with strong drink. In an inventory from the time of that sale to Stocks it was described as having a front room with mahogany long-seating covered in leather, a sitting bar, tap room and filling bar and a lodge room for meetings of such as friendly societies, which were also usually held at pubs.

My photograph dates from this period in its history, to when James Hiley took it in 1908. It passed from Stocks to brewers Webster of Halifax in 1933, whose beer I remember occasionally sampling there in the late 1970s.

Its old small rooms were opened out and for a time its name was reduced simply to Kings but last time I passed it was back to its full name again.

It was one of a number of pubs which served the village that gradually was absorbed into expanding Bradford and which included the Four Ashes, Fleece, George and Dragon, Bull's Head, Royal and the White Horse."