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Weaver to web

From Weaver to Web: Online visual archive of Calderdale History

Welcome to the online visual archive of Calderdale history. It gives you access to over 23,000 images, with supporting historical information.

The Calderdale area includes the towns of Halifax, Brighouse, Elland, Hebden Bridge, Sowerby Bridge and Todmorden.

From Weaver to Web provides access to a wide range of materials. These may be very useful to local and family historians interested in this area.

You will find photographs, postcards, maps, trade directories, handbills and many other types of historical sources.

Archive feature

Plasterwork of two doves in Somerset House

Plasterwork of two doves in Somerset House Examples of plasterwork from Somerset House are preserved at Bankfield Museum.


Royds House, also known as Somerset House, is sited between Rawson St and George St in Halifax town centre. It is a vast 17 bay house and warehouse designed by John Carr of York in the 1760s, for John Royd, a textile merchant. In the 1800s, the building was used as a bank by the Rawson family and later the Huddersfield & Halifax Union Banking Company. Between 1850 and 1857, rooms above the bank were used as a post office. The house was curtailed and renamed Somerset House in the late 19th century. The first floor saloon still retains the decorative plasterwork by the Italian Rococo artist, Giuseppe Cortese, supposedly of John Royd, his wife and family.



The house is a Grade II* listed building and, following restoration and the removal of a parade of shops on Rawson Street, which had obscured the view, it was reopened in 2008. Somerset House is now used particularly for civil ceremonies and celebratory events.
The photographer, Hugh Percy Kendall, was a founder member of the Halifax Antiquarian Society in 1900 and a frequent contributor to their transactions. He was also a former president of the Halifax Photographic Society. He died in 1937 at the age of 62.