Halifax, West Yorkshire

Wool and stone and dancing light

They would not have called it a trading hub in the 1770s, when it was built, but the Piece Hall in Halifax was just that: a place where hundreds of textile makers could come from the surrounding countryside to sell pieces* of cloth. Its construction was a huge collaborative effort by the small business people who had to raise the money for the building and it gave each of them a small part of a market that’s constructed on the grandest scale. We don’t know the architect of this remarkable structure, but whoever it was incorporated 315 individual rooms, each for a single manufacturer and each with its own door on to one of the open arcades that run around the upper floors of the quadrangle. The ground within the courtyard – all 66,000 square feet of it – was paved to provide a magnificent gathering space, a benefit to the city as a whole as well as an asset for the manufacturers.

From its opening on New Year’s Day 1779, hundreds of cloth-makers came to the Piece Hall and it became a key market for the West Yorkshire wool trade for almost a hundred years. However by the middle of the 19th century the textile business was changing, with the opening of more and more large mechanised mills. The new mills produced cloth on such a vast scale that a room in the Piece Hall was no use to their owners – and in any case, it was worthwhile to the buyers to travel direct to the mills. So by the 1870s, the Piece Hall was no longer needed for its original purpose. For the next century it was home to a food market, until in the 1970s this in turn was in decline, and the building was converted for mixed use. More recently, a thorough conservation programme has taken place, so that the beautiful stonemasonry and the paving of the courtyard look well and, one hopes, good for another couple of centuries. It is now, in modern parlance, a cultural hub, housing cafés, bars and shops, and forming an outdoor venue for music, other entertainments, and seasonal markets. 

Standing in the centre of the courtyard today, or looking out from under one of the arches to the opposite range of arcades, the structure is almost too big to take in. Its impact in 1779 must have been enormous – classical architecture on an almost Roman scale in a town of small houses and workshops. Walking along an arcade and looking at the continuous rhythm of the rusticated columns, windows and doors makes the place feel more knowable, more human in scale. But there’s still a sense of how vast it is as the columns and their shadows stretch to a distant vanishing point. And then the sun and stone combine to make patterns of light and shade that raise everything to another aesthetic level. This sense of small elements coming together to make something vast, and also creating dancing patterns of stone and light that visually transcend mere scale seems to me to be of the essence of this building. And of art in general, one might say.

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* A piece was a standard 30-yard length of cloth, woven on a hand loom.

Halifax, West Yorkshire

Looking up in Halifax

Looking up in the centre of Halifax, you quickly realise that many of the town’s shops were rebuilt, on a grand scale in the late-Victorian period. I was particularly struck by a number of streets such as Southgate and Market Street. The clue is in the latter name – this is a block that contains the town’s covered Borough Market. From the streets (especially the two streets I’ve named) the architecture is very imposing, punctuated as it is with turrets, big semicircular windows, tiny windows topped with pediments, variations on the classical orders, and arches with rusticated stone blocks. There’s more than a touch of French Renaissance about all this, but it’s pumped-up French Renaissance, and Nikolaus Pevsner, in the first edition of his Buildings of England volume on West Yorkshire, was rather snooty about it: ‘in an undisciplined French Renaissance style,’ he noted.

And yet Pevsner was a greater invoker of the Zeitgeist. He often praised architecture than reflected the moods and manners of its time and this building surely reflects the confidence and flamboyance of the era in which it was built. When you get inside the market, though, the place lacks the size and theatricality of, say, the great arcades in Leeds. Everything is on a smaller scale, but there’s still an impressive iron and glass roof, with a dome in the middle, which does a good job of getting light into the market, bounded as it is on all four sides by the French Renaissance shops. Those who look up see clear glass (5850 square metres of it), fan-shaped windows with iron tracery, the octagonal dome itself, and a small forest of iron columns holding everything up. This is where the discipline is in this building – the discipline of good engineering that makes everything fit together in a neat and well balanced way and where the Vitruvian virtues of firmitas, utilitas and venustas (strength, utility and beauty) are very much in evidence. The local architects, Leeming and Leeming, did a good job in the 1890s, and their building has stood the test of time: it still seems well used.*

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* There’s more on the history of the market here.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Attention! Authority!

Regular readers of this blog will be aware that the signs of yesteryear are one of my perennial obsessions. Old signage, especially in the form of signs attached to buildings, has cropped up in my posts many times over the years, whether on shop fronts, in railway stations, or down dark alleys. As a pendant to my previous post about the goods warehouse next to Huddersfield station, then, here is a sign (clicking on it should enlarge the picture) attached to that building.

As on previous occasions, I’m struck by the design and materials as well as the language of the message. Here the material is cast iron and the letterform is a plain, bold, sans-serif, all in capitals. That’s just what one expects on a blunt, no-nonsense Victorian notice, and the language too is in some ways very much of its time. Only the ‘PROPERLY APPOINTED COMPANYS SERVANTS’ (no bothering with apostrophes here, no pausing to question whether some of the company’s servants are improperly appointed) may work all the impressive machinery used in and around the station. The company’s servants may operate the capstans and cranes, but if the rest of us go anywhere near them we’ll be interfering with them, and woe betide us. And this decree is made ‘BY ORDER’, the once all-pervasive invocation of nameless and imperious authority. No point in asking (as I remember doing as a small boy, ‘Whose order?’). That sign-off means ‘obey, or else’. The sneer of cold command. The shadow of the omnipotent factory owner or railway company director. I took my photograph and withdrew with dignity, looking most unlike someone who would dream of interfering with a hydraulic crane.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

The great and the goods

Huddersfield station (see my previous post) had imposing buildings for passengers, but a lot of its traffic carried goods. As a result, its goods yard acquired two warehouses, the first, a plain stone building, conventionally built with load-bearing stone walls, and the one in my picture, an enormous structure held up by internal cast-iron columns with an outer ‘skin’ of red and blue bricks.

This monster storage facility was built in 1885, cost £100,000,* and came with its own built-in wagon hoist. The part of the building that protrudes from the facade at the far end, supported by large cast-iron Doric columns, contained this hoist. The mechanism used hydraulic power to raise railway wagons to an upper floor for loading and unloading. Once at the upper level, the wagons could be moved around on internal tracks using electric power, thanks to overhead wires like those supplying modern electric trains. There were also internal hoists and capstans for moving the unloaded goods around, and separating it on to the different floors, each of which was allocated to a particular commodity – textiles, grain, potatoes, miscellaneous goods.

The building has an interesting past but a challenging future. Recent years have seen a roof replacement, and works such as window and door replacements to conservation standards, and work on the interiors with the aim of making them fit for office accommodation and other uses. Marrying such diverse requirements as UK Net Zero targets, thermal efficiency and conservation standards is part of the challenge. But at least the building is being cared for and plans are being made for its future life.

 
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* There are different ways of calculating the value of historical sums of money, but the Bank of England’s inflation calculator puts the value of goods and services costing £100,000 in 1885 at £10,764,769.09 in 2024.

Huddersfield, West Yorkshire

Statement station

Railway station architecture developed during the rail boom of the 1840s and its heyday ended as the 19th century came to its close. It thus spanned the high Victorian period, when British architecture was at its most varied and eclectic. So railway stations, which after all range from vast termini in major cities to tiny halts in the middle of nowhere, can be in any style, especially when we think of the buildings beyond the standard railway structures of train sheds and platform canopies, which developed their own kinds of shapes and forms. Stations can be Gothic extravaganzas like London’s St Pancras or pared-down engineering masterpieces like King’s Cross; they can be cottagey creations like Matlock Bath, fantasias of decorative ironwork like Great Malvern, or tiny corrugated-iron huts like many stations on Great Western branch lines. Or they can be like Huddersfield, statement stations, pinnacles of proprietorial pride in the most correct classical style.

John Betjeman called the front of Huddersfield station the most splendid station facade in England. It was designed by the York-based architect J. P. Pritchard, and opened in 1847. The frontage is actually much longer than what can be seen in my photograph above: on either side of the grand porticoed central structure are nine-bay Corinthian colonnades to which are attached end pavilions, much smaller than the central bock and of one storey, but still impressively classical (see photograph below). The central block itself, with its giant Corinthian columns and rows of windows, would not look out of place as a country house surrounded by acres of parkland.

There are two reasons for the size and elaboration of this station. Firstly, it originally served two separate railway companies whose lines met here: the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway and the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway.* The end pavilions were built as booking offices for these two companies, while the central section was originally a hotel. Eventually the combined booking offices were accommodated in the central building and the pavilions were given over to buffets and bars. Second, the centre of the town was being largely rebuilt when the station was being planned, and the owners of the manor of Huddersfield (the trustees of the Ramsden family), apparently wanted a grand station to complement the large square that was planned – the facade extends all the way along one side of this open space. Its neighbours on the square include Britannia Buildings, a palazzo-like block designed as a warehouse, showroom, and offices for woollen manufacturer George Crosland, and the Italianate George Hotel, built soon after the station, no doubt as it became clear that the accommodation in the station building was not adequate to meet the demand. The station’s other famous neighbour is a statue of celebrated Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson – a local man portrayed striding purposefully along. He’s in silhouette in my photograph,† because on this blog, it’s the architecture that matters.

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* For the full story of the amalgamations and taker-overs involved as these lines evolved, see standard reference books. One of the most helpful for those interested in railway architecture is Gordon Biddle, Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings (Oxford University Press, 2003).

† There are plenty of photos of the statue online, for example here.

Newport, Shropshire

In the sun

As a sequel to my post in August about a splendid 19th-century shopfront on a Georgian building in Newport, Shropshire, here’s another shopfront, this time from the 20th century. The building behind and above the shopfront is interesting in its own right, but for what is hidden from the street as much as what can be seen. The brickwork above the shop window is Georgian, as in my previous post, but this time it’s an 18th-century refacing of an earlier building. What is behind is apparently a 17th-century structure that incorporates an earlier, 16th-century, timber-framed building – a palimpsest of periods that’s typical of English towns, though the accumulation is often hidden from the casual passer-by.

But as I’ve already hinted, it was the shopfront that made me stop and stare. This seems to be a shining example of Art Deco, the style of decoration and architecture that flourished from about 1925 to the start of World War II. So we have a glazed door with a pleasing pattern of panes, all neatness and straight lines. But what’s going on above is more remarkable. The transom, the glazing bar that separates the large lower part of the shop window from the part at the top, rather than being a straight horizontal as is usually the case, describes a gentle continuous curve, reaching its highest point in the centre of the shopfront, above the doorway.

The glazing in the upper section of the window (the transom light, as it’s called) makes three very graphic patterns of clear glass, frosted glass, and leading – in the centre, a sunburst (a classic Art Deco motif) and on either side a more angular, geometrical version of the same design. How revolutionary and modern this must have looked in around 1930. How redolent of its era, a time of glamorous cinemas, brightly coloured fabrics, and Clarice Cliff ‘Bizarre’ coffee sets, it seems today.

Abingdon, Berkshire*

Theme and variations

I was reminded the other day of how I first found out about a late-17th century house in Kibworth Harcourt, Leicestershire. My friend Peter Ashley¶ told me to glance in my rear view mirror as I drove around a bend in the village – I’d see something I’d like, he informed me. The house, which I had to stop to have a look at, features in a blog post of years ago. It’s one of those typical late-17th century houses – symmetrical, with a hipped-roof, dormer windows, classical doorway, of brick with stone dressings. This theme, of a box-like, symmetrical house, was repeated and developed for over a century. It’s the basis both of grand country houses and of many smaller houses in towns and villages.

By the 18th-century, there were many variations on the theme. Casement windows were replaced with sashes, roofs were sometimes gabled rather than hipped, there were endless varieties of doorway design and decorative carvings on keystones. I was reminded of the town of Abingdon (once in Berkshire, now in Oxfordshire), which has several such houses. Looking in my picture files, the best photograph I have from Abingdon is not of the grandest such house, but a good one nonetheless. It’s in East St Helen’s Street in the centre of town and dates to 1732.

The front elevation feels a little squashed, as if the unknown architect was determined to get in the full complement of five windows across the first floor. There are virtually no stone dressings – but there are several such houses in the town that lack this feature, making do, as here, with variations in the brickwork – the chequered pattern and the use of banded brickwork for the quoins and of bricks for the arches above the windows. The keystones to the window arches must be stone, but have been painted white to match the woodwork.

The effectiveness of this design has its roots in a very pragmatic use of elements of classical architecture – symmetry, quoins, pilasters, and so on, without the full-blown apparatus of a portico with columns and a pediment (as in the library building in Stamford that I posted recently). Much 18th-century British architecture uses this vocabulary as a kit of parts that can produce visual harmony. I’d argue that the result is often even more characterful when, as here, it’s combined with elements of local style and material, such as the red and silvery bricks that make up the facade. It’s not trying to be grandiose, rather creating polite architecture on a modest scale. To my mind, the house achieves this very well. It has the quality of elegance but also a sense of strength – there’s nothing about it of what the Resident Wise Woman calls the frou-frou. I hope it’s as pleasant to live in as it is to look at.

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* I use the old county to remind myself and readers that Abingdon is in the Berkshire volume of such guidebooks as Pevsner's Buildings of England series. 

¶ Author and photographer of the Unmitigated England series of books and many others; see his Instagram feed @unmitigatedpete