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.