At the 2001 census the Horbury and South Ossett ward of Wakefield Metropolitan District Council had a population of 10,002.

[6] The settlement predates the Domesday Book of 1086 in which Horbury and Crigglestone, on the south side of the River Calder, were the only parts of the Manor of Wakefield not described as "waste".

The oldest surviving house in the town is Horbury Hall in Church Street, built by Ralph Amyas, deputy steward of the Manor of Wakefield.

[10] The land in Horbury was divided into three great fields, Northfield, Southfield and Westfield, and remains of medieval ridge and furrow of strip cultivation are visible in Carr Lodge Park.

A wooden bridge spanned the River Calder on the road from Wakefield to Huddersfield in the 15th century.

Money for its upkeep was left in local wills dated 1404 and 1492, a custom that continued into the 16th century.

[11] A stone-arched bridge that replaced the wooden structure in the 17th century lasted until it partly collapsed in 1918.

[15] Resistance to the implementation of new textile machinery and the factory system was shown when Luddites, who blamed the new factories for depriving weavers from earning a living in a time of widespread hunger and poverty, destroyed Fosters Mill.

William Sykes's sports goods works which became part of Slazengers was established at about this time.

Charles Roberts (1831–1892) who described himself as a joiner, moved the Buffer and Wagon Works he had established on Ings Road, Wakefield to a site at Horbury Junction in 1873.

[21] In 1905, Richard Sutcliffe (1849–1930), who had worked as part-time manager at Hartley Bank Colliery across the valley in Netherton, opened his Universal Works on the site of the old dye house mill on the Horbury-Wakefield boundary in 1905 and started to manufacture conveyor belts and mining machinery.

[22] Historically Horbury was a chapelry in the parish of Wakefield, in the lower division of the Wapentake of Agbrigg and Morley and part of the West Riding of Yorkshire.

[14] The River Calder flows generally west to east in a wide valley across the south of the town alongside the Calder and Hebble Navigation which made the river navigable to Sowerby Bridge.

A new building is proposed to be built on the current St Peter's site with a completion date of September 2012.

Horbury had a chapel of ease to the Church of All Saints in Wakefield, from before the time of the Domesday Book.

The foundation of St John's Church at Horbury Bridge was in a mission meeting in a room in what is now the hairdressers in 1864.

The curate, Sabine Baring-Gould, wrote the hymn "Onward Christian Soldiers" in 1865 for the Whitsun procession to Horbury Church.

[37] A Methodist society was established in Horbury in about 1746, meeting for worship in a private house in Cluntergate.

In 1765 the congregation built a chapel seating perhaps 200, also in Cluntergate, adjacent to the house which later became the Working Men's Club.

In 1824 a branch of Methodism called the New Connexion erected a chapel in Northgate; the Society was short-lived but the building survives to this day - as a private house.

In 2012 the 1884 building, having been found to be unsafe, was demolished and a new church was constructed further back from the High Street and connected to the old Sunday School.

The Salvation Army corps' former headquarters on Peel Street is now disused, the congregation moving to the Leeds Road, Gawthorpe, Ossett premises.

In his autobiography, he said that Ossett and Horbury were the "border country" where the north-west of the coalfield merges with the south-east of the wool towns.

[45] Two children from Horbury, Christianne and Robert Shepherd, died of carbon monoxide poisoning while on holiday in Corfu in October 2006.