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.