Culture of Haworth

The first Haworth Arts Festival took place in 2000 and was repeated in 2001, but ceased. It was revived in 2005 as a festival combining performing and visual arts and street performance. The festival has community involvement and uses local professional and semi-professional musicians, artists and performers and a larger name to headline each year. It has provided a stage for John Cooper Clarke and John Shuttleworth. The festival has expanded across the Worth Valley outside Haworth and is held on the first weekend in September.

Haworth Band is one of the oldest secular musical organisations in the Keighley area. History records indicate that there was a brass band at Ponden, close by in 1854 with a body of excellent performers. It was founded by John Heaton who lived at Ponden. The band played at a celebration in Haworth at the conclusion of the Crimean War. Over the years the world of brass band music went from strength to strength, during which time the Haworth Band went with it.

Every year the village hosts a 1940s weekend where locals and visitors don wartime attire for a host of nostalgic events.

From 1971 to 1988, Main Street housed the Haworth Pottery (1971-88) West Yorkshire where Anne Shaw produced hand-thrown domestic stoneware derived from the arts & crafts tradition. Her husband, Robert Shaw (poet), depicted life in the village in the 1970s and 80s, in two collections of satires, The Wrath Valley Anthology, 1981, and Grindley's Bairns,1988, praised by The Times Literary Supplement