THE Regency Eastwood House in Victoria Park has been decorated for Coronation Day in 1902, when it was lit "on a scale of dazzling splendour" by 1,177 gas lamps and 5,133 candle buckets, so that the building seemed "luminous from top to bottom, lines of living fire scoring its facade in all directions".

The weary man seen here sitting on his ladders looks as if he has just put most of those lights in place! An estimated 30,000 visited the illuminations.

The elaborate porch on the left formed the entrance to a museum opened in 1899, to which townspeople donated exhibits.

Colonel Sugden of Oakworth gave a "stuffed crocodile from the River Nile", Herbert Smith the skull of a hippopotamus, and Isaac Bailey a "gift of curiosities" including South African assegais and relics of Waterloo and the Franco-Prussian War.

By 1904 Keighley was being commended for its museum, "such as few Yorkshire towns can boast".