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.

Nottingham

Architectural travel

In a city full of outstanding buildings, this one, small but expressive, stands out as far as most. My photograph shows the upper floors of a shop in Long Row (it was a travel agent’s when I was there a while back), and, in a context of flat fronts and plain colours, it combines contrasting materials, contrasting shapes, and planes going this way and that. The first things I noticed were the turrets protruding out and sticking up on either side. But there’s so much more – the stylish roof, the elaborate first floor bay window, the bands of stone among the brick.

So where is this building of around 1900, latterly a travel agency, taking us? Mostly, I think, to the French Renaissance. The steeply pitched hipped roof with its central dormer (framed by classical pilasters) is certainly a French feature, so are the turrets with their conical tops, and so are some of the details on the big window – those chevrons that combine to make diamond patterns, the ornate details above the second-floor windows, and so on. 

There was a fashion for this sort of thing at the turn of the century, part of the increasing variety of styles on which late-Victorian and Edwardian architects felt able to draw upon, from Byzantine revival to Art Nouveau. But this is a particularly English version of the French style, and very much of its time. The brickwork is very English (and looks very well done too), those square panes of glass are of their time, and the central part of the bay window, with its integral arch, is out of the school of Norman Shaw (a shame about the replacement window frames, but at least they follow the pattern of square panes).

Nottingham is a city of wonderful brickwork (those fine industrial buildings, some even with curving walls) and of restless architectural innovation (the work of Watson Fothergill especially). This small building can share city space with them and not fail to shine too.