The Ilkley Journal: 10 of our best reads of 2025
We've curated some of our best writing from the past 12 months ...
Well, here we are, in the very final days of 2025, 12 months of life in West Yorkshire all but wrapped up, a brand new year ahead of us unwritten like a brand new Moleskine diary.
Our first full calendar year in operation – we launched in April 2024 – was a formative one. We got into the flow of things, increased our readership and published a good number of stories about the town, the district and the region.
And though we’re proud of what we’ve achieved in a short period of time, we’re still nowhere near where we want to be as a local news organisation. Our writing could be better. Our stories could be more in the public interest. Our visibility could be improved.
We want to make that more of a reality in 2026. So, if you’ve like what you’ve read so far and want to get behind us, then do consider becoming a paid supporter. A reader-funded model is the only way we can remain sustainable, ad-free and independent.
You can currently do that in three ways for the remainder of the holiday season:
Now back to business. We’ve rounded up what we think are 10 of our best stories of 2025.
From a revealing interview with the CSE survivor and advocate Fiona Goddard to a feature on the battle for the heart and soul of Ilkley Tarn (ducks on one side, frogs on the other) and a satirical sketch covering an Ilkley Town Council meeting to an important factsheet clarifying mistruths and lies about asylum seekers, there’s plenty to demonstrate what The Ilkley Journal is all about.
Thank you and a very happy New Year! 🎆
founder and editor
1. “Whenever I see an adult on a bicycle, I do not despair for the human race.”
Bradford was supposed to get e-bikes in 2025. It didn’t. In June we explored why the scheme didn’t come into being.
How long did it take from that meeting on 3 September for someone to take that first important step forward? Was the project assigned to the council’s equivalent of a project manager? Was a team put together? Was there a kick-off meeting?
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2. There are known knowns, known unknowns, unknown unknowns
Who would have thought speed bumps and 20mph zones would prove to be so troublesome to a small town like Ilkley. We didn’t.
Noise. Vibrations. Uneven speed cushions. Cushions next to driveways. Cushions cluttered with cars (over them, next to them). Drivers having to drive on the other side of the road to travel clearly over a cushion because the other one is blocked. Damage to cars. Traffic. Potentially more pollution. A poorer driving experience. A decline in the aesthetic quality of urban areas. And so on.
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3. A lively if not “bumpy” parish council meeting
Council meetings, though always important, can often be dull. Not this one back in July as we reported.
We were now close to 20 minutes in. Some of the councillors seemed to be getting restless. This bleeding Pandora’s box. When will the nightmare ever end? Why can’t the public just sit there quietly and observe us, as if we were animals in a zoo? When will we ever get to more pressing matters, such as the bedding plants and meeting room costs and libraries! We have an agenda, we must stick to it! Without rules, we are savages! Burns and Milner, it seemed, had played another blinder.
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4. Which councillors are not turning up to full Ilkley Town Council meetings?
You’d think that parish councillors would, save for legitimate reasons, have no trouble turning up to most if not all council meetings. Well, as we discovered, it seems to be a tall ask.
Based on our reading of absences and not presents (and please do correct us if we’ve missed something here), it appears that there has only ever been two instances where all councillors on Ilkley Town Council have been in full attendance for full council meetings. The last one was in September 2024.
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5. Yorkshire and the Humber asylum seeker factsheet
There was a palpable sense in 2025 that an uglier, more public and brazen form of racism had returned, with immigrants and asylum seekers a key target. In this piece, we debunked popular misconceptions and mistruths.
To note, the UK government provides no mechanism for asylum seekers to apply for asylum outside of the UK. That means asylum seekers have to physically be in the UK to claim asylum here. According to the International Rescue Committee, “there are very few safe routes for refugees to travel to the UK” and that the “few existing pathways are extremely restricted by nationality and number”.
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6. Local MP gives thumbs down to lowering voting age to 16 ... what’s the context?
The MP for Keighley and Ilkley, Robbie Moore, isn’t for lowering the voting age to 16. We explained what this historic promise by Labour would mean.
What’s relatively certain is that around 1.5 million 16–17 year olds will be eligible to vote at the next general election, enough to influence, perhaps, marginal or swing seats. To put that number into some context, turnout at the 2024 general election was 59.7% and there were 48.2 million registered voters.
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7. A trip to the public sauna at Draughton Heights
What can you do with a former horse box? Why, turn it into a wood-fired sauna … of course!
Ilkley’s connections with water are deep-rooted – even its moorland is dissected by trickling streams. However, we’ve always had one half of the bargain: a place to get cold, but not necessarily warm up. It’s about time that we had a year-round solution and moreover, somewhere to access the “heat” element of contrast therapy. The sauna scratches that itch.
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8. Race-related hate crime, immigration, identity and economics
Data shows that race-related hate crime in West Yorkshire has increased significantly since 2010. We examined why in an essay.
The writer, Richard Seymour, describes this growing sense of antagonism and xenophobia in the UK and, more generally, around the globe, as disaster nationalism, an apocalyptic fever that has many, many people convinced that this is a Manichean battle between good and evil, between Brits and non-Brits (or is that between the English and the non-English?), between whites and non-whites and even between assimilated minorities and non-assimilated minorities.
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9. Make Ilkley Tarn Great Again? Duck off
One of Ilkley’s most beloved spots has become something of a battleground between, it seems, duck lovers on one side and toad lovers on the other.
The headline on the poster reads: HE’S VOTING! ARE YOU? with supporting copy at the bottom urging people to learn more and back the pro Ilkley Tarn duck campaign and a QR code for convenience. Again, a lot of effort and thought has gone into this – and a few bob, too.
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10. Fiona Goddard: “Sometimes I think, did I die and is this all a bit of a dream?”
We met up with CSE survivor and advocate to find out more about her past and the outcomes she hopes a national grooming gangs inquiry will deliver.
Something in her, back then, broke, seemingly irrevocably. To cope as best as she could, she bottled up her feelings and even “stopped feeling love for a long time”. It wasn’t until her 11-year-old son, a few years back, who has autism and rarely speaks, said to her, “I love you mum”, that this wall she had built up around herself began to crack.
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