A 3-year, £19 million restoration revives Halifax, England’s “best-kept secret”

The Halifax Piece Hall is a historic building in Halifax, West Yorkshire, England. It was built as a cloth hall for handloom weavers to sell the woolen cloth “pieces” they had produced.

As factories started up in the early nineteenth century, the trade in handwoven wool declined and around 1815 the rules were changed to allow the sale of cotton goods.

Halifax Piece Hall opened on January 1, 1779 at a cost of £12,000, with 315 separate rooms arranged around a central open courtyard. The 1996 film, Brassed Off was filmed on location there.

The hall was closed on January 16, 2014 for a £19 million restoration and redevelopment project. The Piece Hall reopened on August 1, 2017.

Nicky Chance Thompson, chief executive of the Piece Hall Trust, said: “Given the 200-year history of the building and scale of the transformation it’s incredible that until now, it has been one of the north’s best kept secrets. We want to give the town a town square to wander around, have conversations and coffee.”

The Piece Hall Trust was established as an independent body in 2013 and, following completion of this restoration, is now responsible for the operation of the historic site as a place where trade, culture, and heritage mix.

Halifax Piece Hall is a rare and precious thing, an architectural and cultural phenomenon which is absolutely unique. It is the sole survivor of the great eighteenth century northern cloth halls, a class of buildings which embodied the vital and dominant importance of the trade in hand woven textiles to the pre-industrial economy of the West Riding of Yorkshire, from the Middle Ages through to the early nineteenth century.

Dating from 1779, when it was built as a Cloth Hall for the trading of “pieces” of cloth (a 30-yard length of woven woolen fabric produced on a handloom), the Piece Hall was the most ambitious and prestigious of its type and now stands in splendid isolation as the only remaining example. It is one of Britain’s most outstanding Georgian buildings.

It is impossible to overstate the scale and importance of this trade, not just to the history of Halifax and the West Riding, but to the nation as a whole over some 800 years between the twelfth and eighteenth centuries.

When it was built, The Piece Hall was a highly visible statement of the great wealth, pride and ambition of the cloth manufacturers. Although built for trade, it also embodied the most cultured sensitivities of the Enlightenment; these bluff northern manufacturers deliberately chose a design for their building which adapted the neo-classical orders of architecture derived originally from the Romans.

From its inception, The Piece Hall was a stunning combination of commerce and culture, an icon of hard business but also a broader statement about the history, the lives and the values of its surrounding community. This fascinating mix of purpose and idealism – business, arts and people, continues to influence and drive The Piece Hall’s role today. A direct link back over almost a quarter of a millenium of history.

The Halifax-born British wheelchair racer and Paralympian Hannah Cockroft said: “I was blown away when I saw it , it’s absolutely fantastic. I feel Halifax lost all this when Piece Hall shut now we’ve got it back and we’ve got it back 10 times better.”

Featured image courtesy of the Piece Hall Trust.

See BBC article.

See Halifax Piece Hall website.