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.