Calderdale 1984

 Calderdale, Yorkshire.  22 and 23 August 1984, revised 2023.

Patrick Roper (December 2023)

In 1985 I started a series of visits to Calderdale in West Yorkshire.  They were to help the local authority, Calderdale Council, develop a tourism strategy for the area.  Perceptive readers might notice that I have a particular interest in food and drink. That’s partly because I was also  in charge of the national Taste of England scheme at the time.

Calderdale is on the river Calder which crosses the area from east to west to form the dale on  the southern part of the Pennines.  It was a major wool production centre and while much of this activity has gone there are still a few manufacturers of quality  woollen goods in the area. The main towns are Halifax, Hebden Bridge and Todmorden and there is much attractive stone-built architecture, mostly industrial or post-industrial, as well as extensive stretches of moorland hill country and other outdoor habitats.

My first visit to Calderdale, a family one, would have been in the early 1970s when we criss-crossed the northern half of the country with three children in Noddy our little Dark Blue Fiat 750: much squabbling, eating, vomiting and singing as we bobbed along to see where different roads went.  On one or more occasions we must have travelled, for example, across Calderdale, through Hebden Bridge to Haworth when we went to see the Brontë heritage there. There must have been other trade route visits due to my work, or family traverses which I have forgotten.  

Then in 1985 I was asked to assess the tourist potential of Calderdale and suggest some development strategies.  Calderdale Borough Council was created in 1974 and they and the government were the main drivers behind this strategy.  It was a pleasant surprise to be asked to help. On this first remembered visit I was met by senior council employees whose job it was to show me round.

Instead of industrial dereliction, Halifax seemed lively and interesting.  Much of the stone on the older buildings had been cleaned (or over cleaned) and was a lovely mellow honey colour - similar to the Cotswolds, and particularly felicitous in the hot August sun.  Our first port of call was the famous Piece Hall , a colonnaded square reminiscent (so I read), on a smaller scale, of the Piazza del Campo in Sienna.  I thought the colonnaded galleries were one of the most impressive architectural wonders I had seen.  Not a church, or house, or factory and perfectly good for its original purpose as a cloth piece market for the small scale weavers from the wider area to offer their woollen goods. As a venue for events and activities the Piece Hall has had its ups and downs in the past half century but, following a large grant from the National Lottery Fund the open ground floor square has been transformed into a shining, pale grey, overstated confection that looks like a squashed North Korean mausoleum. In my view this destroys the beauty of the surrounding colonnaded galleries that so impressed me in 1984.  One of its current activities is a Christmas Market which it is hoped will attract some 30,000 people over the Festive Season.

Next, still in Halifax, we visited the Calderdale Industrial Museum and enjoyed an exhibition of mildly erotic Matisse drawings in the town’s Open Art Gallery.  The splendid, covered Halifax Borough Market was as fascinating as all northern markets and particularly strong on fish.  It was the only time I have seen fresh water or common bream on sale: a large, rhomboid, greeny-brown creature offered at 70p per lb.  It is edible, but not highly recommended.

The town was developing some characterful corners like Crossley's Bar (Food and Wine Emporium) a pioneer attraction in Dean Clough. This later became the John Crossley Bar and closed down permanently sometime before this was written.  Dean Clough comprises a series of Grade 2 listed Victorian mills built in the mid-19^th century and formerly home to John Crossley & Sons said to be the largest carpet manufacturers in the world. The last of the mills closed in 1982.  The complex is situated right in the very bottom of the city and was already as trendy as much in London.  On a later visit I had lunch here of Yorkshire pudding with onion gravy as a starter followed by meat pie with mushy peas (55p) washed down by a properly conditioned pint of bitter (Tetley's from the hand pump, 70p).  The Yorkshire pudding was astonishingly well-risen, towering over six inches above the plate. This tall Yorkshire Pudding tradition has survived in the Clough’s True North restaurant where it features today among such exotic specialities as pulled Moroccan-spiced lamb flatbread.  I suspect prices have gone up a tad.

Dean Clough itself was an extraordinary and unique place with its huge symmetrical factories emerging from a deep ravine.  The honey-coloured stone was patterned with rectangular windows and the sheltered courtyard at the lowest level seemed to trap the still warmth and induce calm reflection.  The huge buildings were embracing rather than overwhelming. On my 1980s visits the Clough had only recently been refurbished with few new residents or tenants but now it is full of businesses large and small, arts and music centres, a theatre, shops and restaurants as well as homes.

In the afternoon we visited Hebden Bridge but I think what  I had been told about the town must have been rather cursory; perhaps my minders wanted to show us round quickly and then go elsewhere.  I wrote that the place was “cleaner, livelier and more prosperous than it was fifteen years ago before the tourists started coming and there was a pride in the local heritage.”  Had I been there 15 years before? If so, I have no recollection of it, but I will return to Hebden Bridge later on in this essay.  On this first visit we had tea in the Mill Restaurant and indulged in some excellent cake.  Now known as Innovations and offering much more than food from its over designed web site, it has an array of shops, studios, restaurants and galleries in the old mill building.  After tea we and drove up the steep hill to the elevated and picturesque village of Heptonstall for a bracing walk round on the narrow roads paved with setts which the residents have insisted on retaining.

In the evening we found, after some difficulty, a hotel where we were to dine called Holdsworth House at Holmfield just outside Halifax. A  lovely grey stone  Jacobean Manor covered in climbing plants and here we re-assembled with our minders.  The food was first-class and costly (their 2023 chicken entrée is £26.50).  I had an avocado with a peach coulis and roast grouse with a sauce including red currants and cranberries.  Holdsworth House is associated with the Knights of St. John of Jerusalem.  One of their stewards is reputed to have brought saffron crocuses back from the Mediterranean. These are still a feature of the gardens and saffron chowder accompanies sea bream on their 2023 menu.  Today’s hotel also offers a wide selection of gins and they write that they are “celebrating Yorkshire craft gin producers and are happy to recommend a gin if you have any difficulty choosing.”  This was my first encounter with the modern craze of offering a range of flavoured gins – it used to be single malts.

We stayed overnight in an old coaching inn, the White Lion in Bridge Gate, Hebden Bridge.  Dating from 1657, the White Lion is reputed to be the oldest building in the town (even older than the Innovations/Mill building?). It is still flourishing and popular today with interesting food and drinks menus.  I was intrigued by wholegrain chestnut bread & whipped pork fat butter offered as a nibble.

Our last day on this trip began with a morning drive across the moors through the hamlet of  Blackshaw Head, 335 metres (1099 feet) above sea level, and another hamlet, Shore, of similar altitude perched precariously on a hillside above Cornholme (almost in Lancashire).  Blackshaw Head was used by packhorse trains on the Long Causeway over the Pennines from Halifax to Burnley.  Finally a quick trot round Todmorden, the dullest of the places visited although a cheery sacristan showed us round the 500 year old church in the town centre. I travelled back to Leeds in a tiny train following the Calder Valley.

 In February 1985 I travelled north with my wife and son partly for a holiday break and partly to work further on the tourism strategy for Calderdale.  We went to Wakefield first to see the tourist information centre in the new Ridings shopping precinct, one of the first of this kind of development in Britain, then we drove over Crow Moors to stay at Law Hill House, Southowram where Emily Brontë worked as a teacher in 1837.  We stayed overnight there and my wife and I slept in the room that may have been Emily Brontë’s.  In the morning light we gazed from the window across a bleak stretch of moorland grass with a single battered elder tree to complete the experience.  The next day w went to Halifax, and again lunched on king-sized Yorkshire Puddings in Crossley’s before visiting Shibden Hall and Folk Museum and staying overnight at Holroyd House, Micklethwaite.  We chose to stay at Holroyd House as various members of the family on my grandmother’s side, including my great aunt Alice, bore the Holroyd name. Sadly Holroyd House no longer seems to exist, at least as a hotel, but at least the stay acquainted us with Micklethwaite which has the distinction of being in the Tolkienesque Wapentake of Skyrack (sic).  The next day was Ilkley Moor, then south to  Holmfirth to see ‘Last of the Summer Wine’ territory. We had lunch in Sid’s Café there, so well-known from the TV series and it is still going strong today with an excellent, straightforward, largely black and white menu that has not been ‘gastroised’.  After lunch we toured the Walkley’s Clog Factory (still flourishing in 2023) along the Hebden Bridge road at Mytholmroyd and stayed overnight at Far Slack farm (West Yorkshire, OS Map ref SD 99177 36563) high on the Pennine moors.  This was just below Top Withens, the now deserted farmhouse supposedly used as a model for Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë the much loved English novelist and poet and in the early evening our son and I walked up there in the cold mist of the winter dales.

 The next day we gathered with a group of colleagues at Hebden Bridge and drove up the steep road to Heptonstall village with its narrow main street paved in flat, square grey setts. The main street and places nearby are bordered by stone built hand-loom weavers’ cottages.  It is attractive but looks a bit like a carefully managed Hollywood  film set.  We visited the impressive octagonal chapel built in 1764 and where john Wesley often used to preach.  The village has two Anglican churches, the first founded in 1260 was badly damaged in a gale and is now just a shell, the second was damaged by a lightning strike in 1875 but is still in use.  The 20^th century poet Sylvia Plath is buried in the graveyard extension but her grave was vandalised when we saw it.  Apparently this happens regularly with people trying to remove the lettering. The problem seems mostly to originate with the controversy around her husband, Ted Hughes’s, supposed attitude to women, feminism and Sylvia Plarh herself.  In the afternoon we walked along the wooded valley of Hardcastle Crags owned by The National Trust and lying to the north west of Hebden Bridge.  My wife and son and I stayed overnight at the hostel adjacent to the Birchcliffe Centre, a repurposed chapel and now a centre for small businesses, particularly those with an arts and crafts orientation. For an evening diversion, we took Dobby to see the film Ghost Busters in the local cinema and were delighted to join an audience that still knew how to cheer, boo and laugh out loud as the film proceeded.  The Hebden Bridge Picture House, a Grade II listed building, has survived many attempts at demolition but is still flourishing and much loved by local people. It is one of the last remaining council-owned cinemas in Britain and independently run.

The Birchcliffe Centre and the Picture House are among the places that contribute to the unique modern history of Hebden Bridge.  As the town declined with the loss of the textile industries and the prices of houses and spaces for small businesses fell, people with an ‘alternative’ view of life started to move in to establish a thriving hub by the mid-70s, a development which seems largely to have been welcomed by the existing residents. As the local history society put it “with these hippies, as the locals called them, came different lifestyles, a radical edge, a wish to live in harmony with the Earth, feminism, shared childcare, folk and rock music, squatting, crafts, a fresh enthusiasm for the countryside and a zest for literature and the arts.”  During our visit in the mid-80s the ‘alternative ‘ feel was there but not exactly trumpeted abroad.  Over the years prices for houses and business premises rose, mainly as a result of the transformative effect of the previous arrivals and the new age people started to drift away. Their legacy is well summed up in an excerpt from Transforming places: lessons from across the UK. Bevan Foundation (2020): Hebden Bridge has clearly transformed itself from a town suffering from industrial decline to a place regularly voted as one of the best places to live in Europe. It has done this by focusing on sustainable living, localism, eschewing chain shops and building an inclusive welcoming community that has clearly succeeded in attracting new businesses and residents.  Although not perfect, it seems that these semi-nomadic people with alternative life styles over a period of a decade or so can be the catalyst for the creation of a kinder, warmer, more sustainable society.  

 On the next day we lunched in Bertie’s Bistro in Elland south of Halifax. The original restaurant was destroyed by fire and reopened as La Cachette, essentially a steak house with a nice French twist.  Bertie’s became the name of the next door banqueting rooms and La Cachette has returned to its original name of Bertie’s Bistro. In regard to this restaurant, I came across a lovely quote from Amanda Wragg in the Yorkshire Post online (2012): “A hundred years ago and in another life, the much-loved Berties Bistro in Elland was one of the few places in West Yorkshire to be seen. What passed for the Halifax glitterati hung out there drinking wine at the bar, eating rustic French food and smoking like soldiers. There were shoulder pads, hair was big and we all had Filofaxes. If you’re thinking Del Boy and Trigger in that priceless West End wine bar sketch you’re not far off.” By the mid-1980s times had changed and there appeared to be few Halifax glitterati there on our visit.

 We then moved on to Todmorden, a cotton rather than a wool town that was formerly in Lancashire.  We stayed in a guest house on Todmorden Edge and had time for a walk round the area in the morning.  One of the footpaths took us near near Dobroyd Castle, now an activity centre opened in 2009 and managed by the Robinwood Trust.  Robinwood is the name of an area in Lydgate a mile or so to the northwest of Todmorden. Dob Royd is simply the name of the place on the southern side of Todmorden where the castle was built. The word ‘dob’ is attested as 13th century common Middle English and is a hypocorism of the name Robin or Robert and similar to Bob.  Royd means some kind of  agricultural enclosure.  Robinwood would thus seem a singularly appropriate name for the centre and I think it was coined before the trust used Dobroyd Castle.

 Dobroyd Castle is a Grade II listed building but there are two remarkable Grade I buildings, the town hall and the Unitarian church, in the town.  The former is said to be one of the finest municipal buildings in England and its neo-classical style makes it look a bit like the Parthenon in Athens. It straddles the river Calder so that half used to be, before boundary changes, in Yorkshire and half in Lancashire. Wherever we walked on our day in Todmorden the darkly beautiful and elegant spire of the Unitarian church seemed to be visible on its spur of hillside just south of the town. On our visit Todmorden had a rather scruffy, boarded up appearance but today it comes across as a smart little town with a wide range of things to see and do and an astonishingly wide range of architectural treasures.  English Heritage has listed as Grade I or II 380 buildings in the town or close by.

 We left Todmorden on the Bacup Road and were surprised to see a notice advertising a space centre at Clough Foot on the southern edge of Todmorden Moor at the western extremity of Calderdale.  We thought it a bit of a joke but since then it has become a well-respected enterprise called The Astronomy Centre. It is one of the phenomena that indicates how well  Calderdale seems to have done since our visit in the mid -1980s, but I suspect the wider population is still unaware of what the district has to offer.

 This essay has a brief coda.  In 1994 I went with a party from he Earth Centre, an ill-fated Millennium Project near Doncaster, with whom I was working at the time, to see Eureka! The Children’s Museum in Halifax. It had been getting much favourable publicity and at The Earth Centre, we thought a version of it might be created there..  Although it was a good day out, I did not particularly enjoy the visit.  The attraction is not really a museum in the sense that it is not based on the conservation and display of artefacts but has contrived apparatus, often enjoyable especially to children to show how things work. However, it is a credit to the organisers that it is still in business especially after the difficulties of recent years.

 

When I first visited Calderdale in 1984, it showed signs of emerging from a difficult industrial past.  Today it seems a better and brighter place and the people and institutions of Calderdale seem to be doing a good job.