People will have their own memories of the Spotted House pub just across Keighley Road from the Oak Lane end of Lister Park.

Many younger Bradfordians will know it only as the Inn-Dian restaurant. One-time members of Bradford Junior Bowling Club and of Airedale Cycling Club will remember it as their meeting place during the 1950s. I recall it from the 1960s and early 1970s as a venue for splendid Saturday-evening traditional jazz gigs.

It's probably too much to hope that there will still be any people around who remember the days when the Spotted House had an open-air swimming pool in its grounds supplied by a spring of water. But it did, along with tennis courts and a pavilion.

These were already derelict and the pool long gone when Wade Hustwick wrote about the Spotted House in one of his Odd Corners of Bradford columns for the Telegraph & Argus in 1962.

In it he reveals that the Spotted House, one of the oldest licensed houses in Bradford, was built on a site near a place called Greenspott, which he speculates might be the origin of its name. In the early 19th century it was attached to a farmhouse, the farm, inn and land around being owned by Ellis Cunliffe Lister.

A tenant later that century was John Hammond, who around 1860 had kept the Turf Tavern at the bottom of Emm Lane. Not long afterwards Samuel Cunliffe Lister sold the Spotted House to John Boyd Tankard, who was Bradford's oldest licensed victualler when he died around 1894 (though Hustwick unfortunately doesn't say how old he was).

His daughter, Jane B Tankard, carried on the business until 1930.

Wade Hustwick observed that the inn sported a later addition to the main structure, nearest to the road, which was built by Ellis Cunliffe Lister, who was made a magistrate in 1812. It was used by him as a Justices' room where he sat and tried offenders.

Ellis Cunliffe Lister was the father of Samuel Cunliffe Lister, who later became the first Lord Masham and built Manningham Mills. He also sold the parkland that was to become Lister Park to Bradford Corporation in 1870 for half its market value, then gave them the £40,000 back in 1898 to go towards the cost of building Cartwright Memorial Hall.

Lister Park later became home to the Lido, the outdoors swimming pool which was a much more sophisticated affair than the spring-fed one which had once graced the grounds of the Spotted House pub across the road.