Calderdale Architecture
To a great extent the style of architecture
in Calderdale has followed the general trend throughout the country.
Following on from the primitive huts of the earlier inhabitants
there was to be a major change with the palatial villas which
came to be built by the wealthier Romans during their four hundred
year occupation, which in turn reverted to the roughly built
homes of the Saxons. Then came further changes with the Norman
influence, and these again were most apparent in the homes and
strongholds of the wealthy upper class. The building of castles
in the early style of motte and bailey, and the smaller but strongly
built manor houses, followed the French pattern and brought new
ideas to Britain, but along with this domestic and military activity
the building of churches and abbeys went hand in hand, and the simple Saxon churches were superseded by more grandiose architecture raised
to the glory of God. The size and style of some of these ecclesiastical
buildings meant that they were many years in the building and
the men who designed them and commenced building in many cases
never lived to see the finished church or cathedral, which made
their work an act of pure faith worthy of its product.
Although Yorkshire was no more than a province
the varied evidence of changing life-styles throughout these
periods was clear to be seen, although to some extent Calderdale
was more an area of Roman roads and wayside camps than of villas
and full-scale forts, and the Norman occupation too, in this
northern district, brought fewer changes than in the south.
For the ordinary person a house was still
an erection of timber, in many parts of the country roofed with
straw or the more intricately woven thatch, although in Yorkshire
the method of covering a roof with stone and later with slate
was soon to be adopted. Indeed the thatched roof was a refinement
which failed to find widespread favour in the north, unlike many
southern parts of the country where this type of housing became
popular and is still to be seen in many towns and villages today.
In the Middle Ages stone was a material reserved
almost entirely for the building of churches and abbeys and its
use in domestic architecture was to come much later. It was common
practice in Calderdale, as in many other places, to strengthen
old timber buildings and render them more weather-proof by encasing
the original timber and plaster structure in an outer covering
of stone; it was considerably later that new houses were to be
built entirely from this local product at the outset. The stone
was quarried locally and in addition to its use in constructing
houses and other buildings in this area it was conveyed to other
parts of the country and later to other parts of the world.
Perhaps the most characteristic feature of
Calderdale architecture is the presence of the 17th and 18th
century handloom weavers' cottages with their typical mullioned
windows and the existence of a loom chamber on the upper floor.
This, above all, demonstrates the dependence of the local population
on wool and the textile trade, while at the same time exhibiting
its effect on the actual buildings of West Yorkshire.
Three of the most interesting architectural
features of Halifax are those pointed out to tourists - the unusual
Wainhouse Tower, a structure which was built as an ornamental
mill chimney and was modified during construction to become a
tower offering spectacular views across the Calder Valley; the
Halifax Piece Hall, opened in 1779 for the sale of pieces of
cloth and later becoming a wholesale fruit and vegetable market;
and Shibden Hall, built in the early fifteenth century by William
Otes.
By the Victorian age the industrialisation
of the country, particularly in the north, had resulted in the
widespread building of long rows of back-to-back houses and cottages
for mill and factory workers, some of which, although cramped
and inconvenient by modern standards, had interesting features.
One of these was the galleried house which was a row of houses
of several storeys with one row above another. The upper houses
had access to their doors along an iron-railed gallery and in
some cases the houses at ground level were cottages of perhaps
only two rooms.
Improvements in the lot of the working man
came with the paternalistic attitude of wealthy businessmen such
as Colonel Edward Akroyd and Sir Francis Crossley and his two
brothers John and Joseph who built specially designed houses
and artisans' cottages for their workpeople and made them available
at reasonable rents or with the option to buy with an early form
of mortgage.
This type of housing was common in Calderdale
until the period between the two World Wars when Town Councils
began their first building schemes, producing estates of modern
through houses intended for the working man, and in particular
for those people who were being moved from the slums. The advent
of World War II put a stop to all buiilding and it was not until
two or three years after the cessation of hostilities that the
boom of post-war demolition and ambitious housing schemes began,
these spreading over much of the rural areas of Calderdale and
providing housing away from the town centres. During this time
it became common for many people to buy there own homes by a
bank mortgage, a decision which was often made due to the difficulty
of finding houses available for rent.
The erection of high-rise blocks of flats
was a short-lived phenomenon which followed national trends but
proved to be a mistake for various reasons and the experiment
was curtailed. In the immediate post-war period prefabricated
houses were constructed in various areas to house returning servicemen.
The advantage of these homes was the speed with which they could
be constructed, but they were built with a foreseeable life-span
of about ten years. That many of these were still in use long
after this period is a tribute to their designers, but also reflected
the continuing lack of suitable housing in the district.
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