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.