Tour of Shibden
The red room
This room is the equivalent of the best bedroom and takes its name from the stencilled frieze that goes all around its walls. The massive oak floorboards, each measuring over 400mm (16 inches) wide and over 5 metres (17 feet) long make up one of Shibden’s original floors.
An interesting feature within this room is the doorway in the left-hand wall, which now leads nowhere since Anne Lister opened the Housebody to the roof, but used to open to the gruesomely named, flesh chamber - not a place for hiding dead bodies, but a place where salted beef and bacon were kept in the 17th century.
The bed
The richly carved four poster bed may always have been at Shibden, it was built in about 1630 at the time when the Lister family first moved in. The tester or roof of the bed is highly decorated and the headboard is intricately carved with grotesque faces and figures. Just the thing for a good night’s sleep!
The powder closet
The room to the right of the fireplace was originally the garderobe (toilet) but is now the Powder Closet where wigs were powdered in the eighteenth century.
Town Hall, Crossley Street, Halifax, West Yorkshire, HX1 1UJ
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