April to June, say weathermen, has been the wettest early summer period on record. One long-range forecast in a national newspaper, perhaps written by somebody with a fondness for Carole King songs, said it might rain until September.

With that cheering thought, we thought our readers might like to be reminded of the days when people got wet at Ilkley Lido to keep themselves cool or willingly risked a wetting by crossing the stepping stones at Bolton Abbey.

Believe it or not, there were days when it was customary for working people to sit out on grassy knolls in Bradford city centre or lay back and sleep in the sun – the days when people had work and lunchtimes.

Above the snoozers in the top left hand-corner of one of the photographs here you can see a corner of Provincial House, formerly HQ of Bradford’s education department and the National & Provincial building society, which was taken over by Abbey National, which in turn was subsumed by Santander.

Provincial House consisted of two joined identical office blocks. They were blown up in a controlled explosion in September 2002. The green mounds had been levelled and cleared to make way for Centenary Square five years earlier. On warm days, they were popular places for sunbathers.

Of course, those were also the days when people were less apprehensive about the risk of contracting skin cancer from exposure to the sun’s rays.

Thirty-two years ago, for example, students at the University of Bradford took full advantage of a hot day in May to chill out in the heat on sloping grass verges below apartment blocks that no longer exist.

Sunglasses, a towel and the odd small carton of milk were all that was required for a good day out in Bradford on May 22, 1980.

T S Eliot began his poem The Waste Line with the line, ‘April is the cruellest month’. Early April 1987 may have been cruel in terms of the weather, for city-centre department store Rackhams had a window display of sunbeds.

It’s hard to say if passers-by admired the apparatus or the lady. It’s the closest Bradford ever got to certain naughty quarters of Amsterdam and Hamburg.

Rackhams, alas, went the way of all flesh in 1995.

In the mid-1960s, The Walker Brothers had a big transatlantic hit with a sorrowful ballad called The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore. A lot of people have been feeling that way about recent summers – remember 2007, the summer of incessant rain and flooding with little cricket for relief?

However, hope is the last thing to die or go down the drain. At the first sign of two or three consecutive days of decent weather, the supermarkets will be stocking up with bags of barbecue charcoal, sun-blocker and other gear associated with long, hot summers.