Flying Scotsman, Leeds 2023, Happy Valley: Yorkshire's cultural highlights from January to March 2023

The lines are part of his lyrics for Awakening , a song by his band LYR titled in tandem with an event at Headingley Stadium, which kickstarted Leeds 2023 in January.

The year-long cultural festival opened with a ceremony, The Awakening, featuring local stars including singer Corinne Bailey Rae and Huddersfield-born Armitage, and hosted by Gabby Logan.

Billed as a “collision” of music, poetry, performance, comedy, dance and film – a celebration of the city’s cultural past, present and future – it came after Leeds was denied a chance to become European Capital o f Culture this year because of Brexit.

After the opening event at the home of Leeds Rhinos, events throughout the year included the WOW (Women of the World) Barn on Cinder Moor, Woodhouse, in April and May. Built by women over 24 hours, the barn became a place to showcase talks, music, food, workshops and comedy from the likes of Bridget Christie.

In the second half of the year there was Making a Stand, as visual artist Michael Pinsky and award-winning environmental architects Studio Bark repurposed City Square for an installation inspired by the Forest of Leodis.

Kirklees Year of Music 2023 also brought plenty of culture to other parts of West Yorkshire, with regular performances and instalments of TOWNSOUNDS, the area’s oral histories podcast by singer-song writer Sam Hodgson.

When it came to television, though, there was one show which stood out from all the rest: Happy Valley.

The third and final series aired through January and February and was met with critical acclaim and huge ratings as Sarah Lancashire’s Calderdale police sergeant Catherine Cawood had her final showdown with the villainous Tommy Lee Royce, played by James Norton.

Sally Wainwright's show became one of the most-watched drama series of the past 10 years, with official ratings showing that the finale boasted a consolidated TV audience of 11.1 million. Only four other series since 2013 have achieved higher ratings, including police thrillers Line of Duty and Bodyguard.

US viewers, meanwhile, were advised to watch with subtitles to understand the “thickly-accented” dialogue.

The National Railway Museum is always a choice venue for lovers of locomotives, but this year it really put on a show as it celebrated the centenary year of Flying Scotsman in style.

On February 24, it was 100 years since the train – built in Doncaster – entered service and the museum in York hosted a programme of events featuring a stop by the locomotive itself, visits to heritage railways, an exhibition and VR experience.

Meanwhile, in theatre, the Ukrainian National Opera visited for its first UK tour as the war with Russia raged on in its homeland. The company, from Dnipro, set out to perform Carmen and Madama Butterfly in February, going on to do shows in York, Scarborough, Halifax, Doncaster and Harrogate.

Over in Haworth, visitors were learning about the Brontë family’s connection to the outdoors.

The Brontës and the Wild exhibition started in February at the Brontë Parsonage (and is on until January 1), bringing together artworks and manuscripts all associated with the landscape.

An acquisition to the Parsonage’s collection takes pride of place in the exhibition: the Brontë family’s annotated copy of Thomas Bewick’s A History of British Birds, which was obtained from the Blavatnik Honresfield Library.

In March, writer and historian Jill Liddington released As Good As a Marriage. It is the sequel book to her 1998 work Female Fortune, which is credited as Sally Wainwright’s inspiration for the hit television series Gentleman Jack.

The first book looked at the life of lesbian landowner Anne Lister between 1833 and 1836, and the follow-up this year explored her famous coded diaries from 1836 up until 1838, looking at life at Halifax’s Shibden Hall after Lister’s “marriage” to Ann Walker.

“Anne Lister courageously though discreetly could live a lesbian life up at Shibden in the 1830s,” Lidington told The Yorkshire Post. “And thanks to her diaries, we can now know in graphic intimate detail all about it. If you watched Gentleman Jack and wondered what Anne Lister did next, it is the perfect next read.”

Meanwhile, down in South Yorkshire, Sheffield held its Festival of the Outdoors in March, which celebrated the return of longer days and dryer conditions with activities such as walking, climbing, biking and running.

It coincided with the Sheffield Adventure Film Festival, which featured adventure, travel and extreme sports films from around the world over three days of screenings at the Showroom Cinema.