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.

Stanton, Gloucestershire

 

Sheepdogs, or, Odd things in churches (16)

I can’t remember when I first went inside the church of St Michael and All Angels, Stanton, in the north Cotswolds, but I think I already knew the story behind the bench-end in my photograph. Perhaps I knew the story from the Gloucestershire volume of Arthur Mee’s series, ‘The King’s England’, probably the only book that my parents had that would have held such a historical tidbit: ‘It may be that when Wesley preached in this place there listened to him shepherds from the hills who would tie their dogs to the ends of the benches, which still have the marks of the chafing of the chains which held the dogs.’ Such marks can certainly be seen on the bench end in my picture, perhaps from the chains themselves or from a metal ring to which chains were attached.

Can this be true? It’s certainly plausible. For centuries, Cotswold farms were the sheep farms par excellence of England. For years I’ve lived in this part of the country and there are still plenty of sheep farmed around here. Shepherds might these days ride around on quad bikes or in 4 x 4s, and wherever they go their dogs go with them. In church, in the 18th century or earlier, one can imagine the chained dogs excited on their weekly meeting with the neighbours pulling on their chains and chafing at the woodwork before settling down quietly by the time the service began. We’re often told that Cotswold churches (like many in Suffolk and other areas) were built from the proceeds of the wool trade. It’s good to be reminded that none of that money could have been made without the people who raised the sheep – and the animals that rounded them up.

Trowbridge, Wiltshire

House of holes

A while back I wrote a blog post about Herefordshire barns with walls of pierced brickwork to provide ventilation. Imagine my pleasure, then, when on a recent visit to Trowbridge in Wiltshire I came across this, a structure that looks like a patriarch among pierced brick buildings, a house of holes. It is a legacy of Trowbridge’s cloth manufacturing industry, which flourished in the 18th and 19th centuries, when the town was known as ‘the Manchester of the West’. The pierced brick structure, squeezed into a space near a former woollen mill – it’s actually built on a bridge over the River Biss – is called the Handle House and its use requires a little explanation.

One of the finishing processes in the manufacture of woollen cloth is known as ‘raising a nap’. The nap is the furry finish that makes many cloths soft and pleasant to the touch. A traditional way to raise a nap was to stroke the fabric with the seed heads of the teasel plant, which bear dozens of naturally barbed or hooked spikes. The spikes catch in the fibre and pull it up, producing the nap. A number of teasel heads were mounted on a wooden handle and dragged across the cloth – at first by hand, later using a machine. The process was generally done when the cloth was wet, because its fibres are less prone to damage then. But the teasels would get soggy and soft when they became damp, and so were less effective. So they have to be dried. One way to do this was to suspend them in a building like this, when the cross-draught would dry them, restoring their strength.†

That’s where the Handle House came in. It was probably built in the 1840s and is very impressive indeed. There must have been quite a few buildings like this, but this is only one of a very few left (some sources say there is only one other in the country). The pierced walls must have made them very difficult to use for anything else once they were no longer required for their original purpose; additionally, the way they’re built hardly makes them the most robust structures in the world, so some examples probably fell quickly into dilapidation. This one is hanging on, and being very unusual is listed at grade II*, a testimony to the ingenuity of the woollen business that has long since left the town.

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† I once blogged a heated building for teasel-drying here.

Melksham, Wiltshire

Five early pieces: 5

My final reprise (for now) is one of my smallest buildings (and one of my shortest posts). The roundhouse in Melksham...

This small surprise is tucked away in a side-street in the Wiltshire town of Melksham. It’s an 18th-century structure, built, Melksham being a wool town, as a wool-drying room. When the wool trade declined in the 19th century many such buildings were no doubt demolished. But this one survived, playing down the years a multitude of roles – armoury for the local volunteer militia, feed store, business premises, tourist information centre, and museum. England has many specialized structures like this, the often odd-shaped remnants of local industries – oast houses and lime kilns come to mind. Often they seem designed so precisely for their original function that adaptation appears impossible. But with a little imagination, many of them have been recycled to the delight both of their users and of passers-by.

Postscript 2012 This small paragraph contains a large truth: that the survival of historic buildings often depends on finding new uses for old structures. Even a highly specialized building like the roundhouse has lasted more than 200 years because people have found different things to do in it and with it. Sometimes a change of use requires some adaptation of the building, but a little sensitive alteration is better in the vast majority of cases than demolition or dereliction. Let’s hear it for thoughtful adaptation and sensitive reuse.

Roundhouse, Melksham, Wiltshire

This small surprise is tucked away in a side-street in the Wiltshire town of Melksham. It’s an 18th-century structure, built, Melksham being a wool town, as a wool-drying room. When the wool trade declined in the 19th century many such buildings were no doubt demolished. But this one survived, playing down the years a multitude of roles – armoury for the local volunteer militia, feed store, business premises, tourist information centre, and museum. England has many specialized structures like this, the often odd-shaped remnants of local industries – oast houses and lime kilns come to mind. Often they seem designed so precisely for their original function that adaptation appears impossible. But with a little imagination, many of them have been recycled to the delight both of their users and of passers-by.

Wool, Dorset

ARCHITEXTS: THINGS WRITTEN ON BUILDINGS (5)
They don’t take any nonsense in Dorset. You damage this bridge and you’re out, understand? It’s been here since the 16th century and we want it to stay that way. Not that there’s any room for misunderstanding with all this typographical shouting (‘guilty of FELONY’, ‘TRANSPORTED FOR LIFE’), which reminds one of the barely suppressed menace of old income tax forms (‘if you are a MARRIED MAN’). It all looks like zero tolerance, a century before anyone thought of the term. I don’t think they’ll put you on a slow boat to the antipodes any more if you damage this bridge, wilfully or not. But you’d better behave. Just in case. OK?

Many thanks for the picture of the bridge sign at Wool to Peter Ashley, who blogs about England’s glories and eccentricities here.