The writer J B Priestley will forever be linked to his birthplace, Bradford, even though he left the city at the age of 20 to go to war and never really returned on any permanent basis.

In 1894, Priestley was born into a Bradford of dark, Satanic mills, urban decline, smoky vistas and poor health.

It was also a fascinating place, especially to the modern Bradfordian. A place of grand buildings, cobbled streets, characterful faces and enigmatic nooks and crannies.

In a bid to pay homage to that Bradford, much of which has long, long gone, author Dr Gary Firth has assembled a fascinating book looking at the Bradford that JB Priestley would have lived in during the first 20 years of his life.

A mixture of detailed historical and contemporary photographs, the book is an absorbing insight into a forgotten time.

As Firth says in his introduction to JBPriestley's Bradford: "If ever a writer was moulded and fashioned by the environment into which he was born and nurtured, it was J B Priestley in the West Riding of Yorkshire before 1914, more particularly in the Bradford of the Edwardian era.

"He once said of his two most biographical works: 'if there are better accounts of what it was like to be a youngster in pre-1914 Bradford than thereareinBright Day and Margin Released, I would dearly like to read them'."

Largely a photographic record, with entertaining and informative captions from Firth, the book provides a pleasing mixture of landscape shots and people pictures.

Anonymous mill workers sit side-byside with photographs of Priestley's neighbours or first loves; a tram accident is recorded in great detail, as is a reproduction of Priestley's first photograph in uniform before being despatched to the Western Front.

This combination of the intensely personal with the broader brush strokes of life in Bradford in the first years of the 20th Century is what makes the volume fascinating.

Firth says: "In this publication we take a peep into the Bradford way of life during the years before the First World War.

"Through a selection of photographic images and some of Priestley's own written words, I hope that you the reader are able to share a vivid, if transient, understanding of a great writer's 'lost world'.

"And so it was, for Priestley's early life coincided with the zenith of Bradford's golden age as a classic 19th century provincial town.

"It was a unique experience in urban history and to one of its favourite sons a very special place indeed."

Much of the material in the book was assembled for a permanent exhibition which was established at the University of Bradford library named after the writer, in 1997.

Priestley's son Tom provides a foreword for the book, and writes: "Each of you may have your own Bradford but this is my father's and he presides over it permanently from his plinth overlooking the city centre.

"One could imagine a Bradford with him but never J B Priestley without Bradford."

JB Priestley's Bradford, by Dr Gary Firth, is published in paperback at £12.99 by Tempus Books