Tim Binding lived in Ilkley, Yorkshire until he was seven, and the place shaped his imagination and has haunted him ever since, especially the death by drowning of Michael Airey, his childhood friend.

On Ilkley Moor is an imaginative history of a town: a series of explorations, partly factual, partly intuitive and partly personal. It is the tale of Victorian optimism - of faith in hydropathy, in manufacturing, in the railways. It is an examination of Ilkley's place on the faultline between the two great forces which have informed English life and culture: its rural heritage and the industrial revolution. It is a book about the north, about industry, commerce and medicine and, above it all, it is one small story of England, of going back, of the fifties and the lost dreams of that era - not a travel book, but a return home to the place that made the writer what he is.

'An evocative, resonant and sometimes disturbing book' Philip Hoare, Independent

'Fascinating... a journey into the heart of Yorkshire gone by, this is a powerful book, constantly informed by the hulking moor above the town' Conde Nast Traveller