Halifax Renewed

Halifax - A Case Study in Renewal: Introduction

Halifax is a town of some 82,000 people and the local government centre and largest town of Calderdale Metropolitan Borough, West Yorkshire. The town has a long history, being one of the region’s largest in the late middle ages. It built its prosperity on the production of cloth, notably fine quality woollens as well as carpets, wire, engineering equipment such as lathes, confectionery and service industries, notably building societies. After the middle of the twentieth century industrial decline set in with increasing rapidity. Many towns in the area were suffering already, with empty buildings and dereliction becoming more common. Places along the River Calder such as Todmorden, Hebden Bridge, Sowerby Bridge, Elland and Brighouse experienced losses. Halifax had advantages of size and diversity, but by the early 1980s was also being hit hard. Some regeneration projects had already begun in the 1970s, but it was in Hebden Bridge where, during the 1960s, decay had begun to alarm local people, that deliberate moves were made to reverse the trend. A number of initiatives, coupled with major local government reorganisation coming into force in 1974, sought to find new uses for empty buildings, often under the umbrella of tourism development.

Halifax had its own projects during those same years, the flagship being that of saving the 1779 cloth market, the Halifax Piece Hall, from demolition, and turning it into a visitor attraction to be used by local folk and by tourists. As in so many places in Britain the 1950s and 60s had seen schemes setting out to demolish wholesale old town centres. In nearby Leeds these included the creation of the Bond Street Centre out of an area of Victorian properties. A London company, Shingler Risdon, had proposed demolishing much of the area between Halifax Town Hall and the town’s railway station. They also had a scheme, smaller in scale, for the St Georges Square area of Hebden Bridge. In that town prominent townspeople had debated the idea. Some of them opposed it, and when officers of the Yorkshire Tourist Board joined in and spoke publically against the proposals on the grounds that there was a better potential to be had through conservation and tourist promotion, it was dropped. In Halifax it seems that the Shingler Risdon proposal came to nothing partly, as in the Hebden Bridge case, because local Civic Trust societies became active in opposition, and partly because, in a nail-bitingly close vote in the old Halifax Borough Council, it was decided to prevent the demolition of the Piece Hall and to turn it into a tourist attraction. This was during 1973 and one of the last acts of the Borough Council before reorganisation. It is also important to remember that both Calder Civic Trust and Halifax Civic Trust had been running clean-up activities in the late 1960s.

One of the next series of postings on this web site will look particularly at the case study of Halifax in tourist-related regeneration. This is the first. What happened in the town does have to be seen in the context of work in Hebden Bridge and the other Calderdale towns. Regional initiatives in west Yorkshire and east Lancashire and along the M62 ‘corridor’ from coast to coast were also under way. But writing an account of all of those would take a book – a big book – so the particular community of Halifax will be used as a focus. Of course tourist-related regeneration was being found in schemes large and small throughout the UK, so again some brief reference to that has to be made occasionally to prevent narrow parochialism setting in. The first major efforts relating tourism and regeneration began as far back as 1959 in the Lower Swansea Valley thanks to the work of the University College of Wales in Swansea, Swansea Council and dozens of commercial, statutory and voluntary groups. They took on the whole of a valley area rather than an individual site or building.

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