Halifax Audio Tour: The Pulse of Halifax Past and Present

On your right, look for the red-brick, almost box-shaped chapel with its square form and the surviving steeple beside it, now woven into the library.

Square Chapel started as a bold idea from local preacher Titus Knight, and architects Thomas Bradley and James Kershaw set it rising in seventeen seventy-two. John Wesley himself came here that July... and that tells you this place mattered fast. It was a Nonconformist chapel, meaning it served Protestants outside the Church of England, so the design kept the inside open, with no supporting pillars blocking the preacher from view. Even the material made a statement: red brick, not Calderdale’s usual stone. In the eighteen fifties, a new chapel joined it on the north side, and this older building became a Sunday school. If you check the before-and-after image, you can see how the tower-heavy view of two thousand and nine became today’s polished arts setting. Since nineteen ninety-two, music, theatre, and performance have filled these walls again, and both chapel and steeple are specially protected historic treasures.

This place shows Halifax turning faith, memory, and art into one living story. Take your time here... when you're ready, we can continue to Piece Hall.

In front of you rises a huge honey-colored sandstone rectangle, lined with repeating arched galleries and marked by a grand classical gateway.

This is the Piece Hall, a Grade One listed building, which means it has the highest level of historic protection in the U-K. Halifax created it for handloom weavers to sell their cloth “pieces” - finished lengths of woollen fabric, including worsted, a smooth tightly spun wool cloth that became one of Yorkshire’s great signatures. In seventeen seventy-four, local leaders chose this site, Talbot Croft, because they wanted buyers and sellers in one organized place... more competition, faster deals, and fewer fraudsters.

When the hall opened on the first of January, seventeen seventy-nine, it contained three hundred and fifteen separate rooms around one open courtyard. That layout mattered. Traders could inspect cloth, argue over price, and keep negotiations private, room by room, while the whole building functioned like a giant engine for Halifax’s textile trade. If you glance at the app, the aerial image shows that rare rectangular plan beautifully clearly. And the cloister image reveals the covered galleries that tied all those little trading rooms together.

My favorite part is the mystery: nobody knows for certain who designed it. Historians have suggested Thomas Bradley, Samuel and John Hope, and John Carr, but the true architect never signed the story.

Then the Industrial Revolution changed everything. Bigger mills cut out the small producers, and the hall declined. Halifax Corporation bought it in eighteen sixty-eight and turned it into a wholesale market. By nineteen seventy-one, people even considered tearing it down... but public funding saved it. After another major restoration, costing nineteen million pounds, the Piece Hall reopened in August twenty seventeen and began a bold new chapter, even hosting major live music, with Father John Misty headlining the first big concert.

It’s open daily from nine in the morning until eleven at night if you’d like to return and explore more.

This place is Halifax turning cloth, commerce, and culture into architecture. Stay with it for a moment... and when you’re ready, we can head on to the next stop.

On your right, look for the dark stone rectangular frontage with a tall central arch and a disciplined row of windows.

This is Prescott Street drill hall, a Grade Two listed building, which means it is legally protected for its special historic interest. Architect Richard Coad designed it for the Fourth West Yorkshire Rifle Volunteer Corps, and builders finished it between eighteen sixty-eight and eighteen seventy. A drill hall was a military training base, where volunteers learned to march, handle weapons, and move as one. By eighteen eighty-three, this unit had become the First Volunteer Battalion of The Duke of Wellington's Regiment, and by nineteen oh-eight, the Fourth Battalion. Then came August nineteen fourteen... men gathered here and mobilised for the Western Front. If you glance at your phone, the close-up image shows how much of that stern military frontage survives. In nineteen thirty-eight, the battalion became the Fifty-eighth Anti-Tank Regiment, Royal Artillery, and after later reductions and reorganisations, the military chapter ended in nineteen ninety-nine, when the hall was decommissioned and converted for residential use. This place holds Halifax's volunteer soldier story in plain sight.

Take one more look here. When you're ready, we can head on to Borough Market.

On your right, look for the long stone frontage wrapped around a broad glass-and-wrought-iron roof, with little baroque turrets pricking the skyline like a Victorian flourish.

This is Borough Market, Halifax’s great covered market, and it really does announce itself. It fills a town-centre block between Southgate, Albion Street, and Market Street, with ornate four-storey stone buildings on two sides and a huge canopy stretching over the trading space. Those upper floors were living quarters for traders and managers, so this was never just a shopping spot... it was a whole working world.

Trade had already rooted itself here by eighteen ten, when an Act of Parliament forced street trading into this area. Before the market you see now, a red-brick Georgian market from seventeen ninety stood on the site. Then, in eighteen fifty-three, another Act let Halifax council buy what people called New Market for seven thousand seven hundred pounds, roughly around a million pounds today. By eighteen ninety, the old place was overflowing, so the Markets and Fairs Committee hired local architects Joseph and John Leeming to dream bigger. The Corporation raised fifty thousand pounds for the job, several million today, but the final bill climbed to one hundred and thirty thousand pounds, well over ten million in modern money. Victorian ambition had expensive taste.

Work started in October eighteen ninety-two and moved slowly, but the payoff came on the twenty-fifth of July, eighteen ninety-six, when the Duke and Duchess of York opened it here in Halifax. Later, the world knew them as King George the Fifth and Queen Mary.

And inside... wow. An eighteen-metre octagonal lantern rises at the center - octagonal just means eight-sided - held up by decorative cast-iron columns. The main walkways form a cross shape under the roof, and the floor still uses flagstones from Solomon Marshall’s quarry at Southowram. Cleverly, the whole sloping site works without steps. If you glance at the image on your screen, you can see the market’s famous clock, the old meeting point that craftsmen refurbished with more than fifty square feet of gold leaf in nineteen ninety-three.

The market’s edges once told you exactly what was sold where: butchers around most of the outside, fishmongers on Albion Street, and three pubs on Market Street - the Wheatsheaf, the Saddle, and the Peacock. Halifax kept polishing this place too: the stonework got cleaned in nineteen seventy-three, the Victorian shopfronts won a Civic Trust award in nineteen eighty-seven, and in two thousand and eight the market won best market from the National Association of British Market Authorities. If you want, the app’s before-and-after image gives a neat little glimpse of how the exterior sharpened up between two thousand and eight and twenty twenty-two.

It’s Grade Two Star listed, which means it’s officially recognized as an especially important historic building. If you want to come back inside, it usually opens Monday through Saturday from eight in the morning to four-thirty in the afternoon, and it closes on Sundays.

Borough Market proves that everyday buying and selling can look absolutely grand.

Take a moment here, and when you’re ready, we can wander on to Halifax Town Hall.

On your right, Halifax Town Hall rises in pale sandstone with a grand arched portico, a tall corner tower and spire, and the old Halifax coat of arms carved above the entrance.

This place is Halifax showing off... and honestly, it earned the right. In the mid nineteenth century, the town kept asking for a proper civic headquarters, first in eighteen forty-seven, then again in eighteen fifty-three, then again in eighteen fifty-six. The push really gathered force after the Improvement Act allowed the borough to borrow fifteen thousand pounds, roughly a couple of million pounds today, for a town hall, courthouse, and police station. Local industrial giant John Crossley was reshaping this area at the same time, and that helps explain why the hall fits so neatly with the surrounding Crossley Street buildings.

Then came a wonderful twist. Charles Barry judged the design competition, disliked every entry, and the town basically said... fine, you do it. He did. Barry drew up this confident classical design, meaning a style inspired by ancient civic buildings, full of arches, columns, balance, and authority. He died in eighteen sixty, so his son, Edward Middleton Barry, carried the design through. Whiteley Brothers built it on land from Crossley, using twenty-four thousand tons of local Ringby sandstone from Swales Moor.

Now look up at that tower. It climbs to one hundred and eighty feet, and it is packed with symbolism. Sculptor John Thomas decorated the steeple with figures representing Europe, Asia, Africa, and North America, with four seven-foot angels at the corners. If you want a closer look, check the tower image on your screen. It is such a Victorian idea of worldliness: empire, trade, ambition, all carved into stone above the town.

And the opening? Absolutely enormous. On the third and fourth of August, eighteen sixty-three, three hundred and fifty-eight trains brought seventy thousand people, and thousands more walked in. The future Edward the Seventh arrived by royal train, greeted by guns on Beacon Hill and a guard of honor of three hundred soldiers. There was a grand procession, children singing hymns in the Piece Hall, hundreds of police controlling the crowds, a banquet, a balloon ascent, and fireworks. Princess Alexandra did not come, to the heartbreak of many spectators, and the Halifax Courier described streets fragrant with flowers even as relentless rain turned celebration into soggy chaos.

Inside, the drama keeps going. Victoria Hall glows with mosaic floors, ornate plasterwork, and a blue-and-green glass ceiling. The grand staircase rises under a blue glass dome, with paintings by Daniel Maclise and J. C. Horsley. If you fancy a peek, the app shows that spectacular interior beautifully. The building still serves as the headquarters of Calderdale Metropolitan Borough Council, so this is not a frozen monument; it is still doing the civic job it was created for.

One tiny detail I love: the bells have not rung at night since nineteen eighteen, because the great singer Dame Nellie Melba complained they disturbed her sleep at Halifax’s Princess Hotel. That is local government meeting diva power, and somehow it feels exactly right.

Halifax built this town hall to sound important, look important, and believe in its own future.

Take one more look up at the spire, and when you’re ready, we can carry on to the bus station.

On your right, look for a broad glass-and-steel station hall with a long low roof and a clean row of bus bays built into the frontage.

This is Halifax bus station, owned and managed by West Yorkshire Metro, and it tells a very modern kind of town story: not ancient stone, but reinvention. The older station used several island platforms, those central boarding strips surrounded by traffic, and then in March twenty twenty-one crews began preparing a complete replacement. They had to keep Halifax moving while they rebuilt it, so the station shifted through a careful series of temporary layouts... first a few old stands stayed open, then services moved left, then south, and by late February twenty twenty-two passengers were using a six-stand temporary station labeled A to F. It was basically transport choreography with hard hats.

The new station reopened on the first of October, twenty twenty-three, with nineteen reversal bays, a layover area, and four accessible entrances from the town centre side, including routes from Northgate, Winding Road, and Wade Street. If you like, tap the before-and-after image and you’ll see how dramatically this Winding Road side changed from building site to gateway.

And what a gateway it became. The fifteen point four million pound redevelopment created a fully enclosed station with solar power on the rooftops, coach departures from stand one, and stands two and three set aside for drop-offs. By July twenty twenty-four, the final phase finished, all nineteen stands were in use, and services including National Express coaches had returned. Inside, travelers can find A-T-M-s, defibrillators, a newsagent, public toilets, and a Travel shop.

From here, First West Yorkshire, Arriva Yorkshire, and Team Pennine send buses out to places like Brighouse, Elland, Ripponden, Sowerby Bridge, Bradford, Leeds, and Keighley. Even routes that once skipped the station, including many for Illingworth and Mixenden, now come back through this hub.

This is Halifax in motion, practical and proud.

Take it in for a moment, and when you’re ready, we can continue on to the power station.

Stand here and picture Foundry Street humming with boilers, belts, and turbines... because from December of eighteen ninety-four until the late nineteen sixties, Halifax power station poured electricity into the town and the wider district.

The story starts with a burst of civic ambition. In eighteen ninety-two, Halifax Corporation asked the Board of Trade for a provisional order, which was basically legal permission to generate and sell electricity under the Electric Lighting Acts. Parliament confirmed it, and the town got serious about powering itself. That confidence had already shown up nearby: in eighteen ninety-three, Halifax’s municipal refuse destructor, the town’s waste-burning plant, became the first in Britain to generate electricity from refuse. It used a Livet steam generator and a Parsons turbo-alternator rated at twenty-five thousand candle power, or about three hundred and fifty-five kilowatts.

The earliest machinery here sounds almost like a giant mechanical orchestra. The original station used vertical and horizontal engines, some coupled directly to alternators, others driving them by ropes. By eighteen ninety-eight, the station could generate six hundred kilowatts. That may sound modest now, but it supported a maximum load of two hundred and ninety-five kilowatts, supplied three hundred and five customers, powered twenty-six public lamps, and delivered two hundred and eighteen thousand, seven hundred and seven kilowatt hours.

Then demand exploded. By nineteen twenty-three, coal-fired boilers were sending out up to two hundred and thirty-five thousand pounds of steam an hour. Steam drove a whole lineup of generators, including a ten thousand kilowatt British Thomson-Houston turbo-alternator - a steam turbine spinning a generator - and that machine became the first here to run at three thousand revolutions per minute. Another ten thousand kilowatt unit arrived in nineteen twenty-five. Halifax even offered different kinds of supply: three-phase alternating current at four hundred and two hundred and thirty volts, and direct current at four hundred and sixty and two hundred and thirty.

And here is the human drama: in the nineteen twenties, Halifax and Huddersfield distrusted the Yorkshire Power Company so much that they paid to lay an underground cable between their systems, even though the company already had an overhead line and would have sold electricity more cheaply. Power was politics, pride, and local identity.

That mattered nationally too. The Central Electricity Board chose Halifax as a “selected station,” meaning one of the efficient stations picked to feed the new national grid. By the nineteen fifties, the place hit its peak: four Babcock and Wilcox boilers, four turbo-alternators, six huge wooden cooling towers, and an installed capacity of forty-eight point three megawatts. In nineteen forty-eight, the state took over the electricity industry, and Halifax Corporation lost control. By the late nineteen sixties, the station closed, the buildings came down, and commercial units replaced them... but the site still carries power as Halifax’s one hundred and thirty-two kilovolt substation.

Even without the chimneys and turbines, this ground still feels charged with Halifax’s restless energy. Pause here for a moment, and when you’re ready, we can head on to North Bridge.

On your left is a broad iron-and-stone bridge with two sweeping arches, Gothic-style railings, and a little turret that holds a drinking fountain.

North Bridge is Halifax showing off. It strides across the Hebble valley in Victorian Gothic style, a nineteenth-century taste for church-like drama, with buttresses, pointed lancet openings, and parapets pierced with quatrefoils, those four-lobed shapes you see in medieval design, plus tiny Maltese crosses worked into the pattern. If you check the image on your screen, you can really catch those details in the bridge skin itself.

But this crossing has a long, rough family history. A wooden bridge stood here by the year twelve seventy-seven. Then a stone one took over, and in seventeen seventy, during Rogation Day, when people walked the parish boundary in a ceremony called beating the bounds, that bridge collapsed and injured many in the crowd. Halifax did not give up. Matthew Oates of Northowram started a replacement in seventeen seventy-two, using stone from Crib Lane quarries. His bridge stretched four hundred feet in six arches and carried the main toll road, complete with a toll booth. After a fatal incident there in eighteen nineteen, workers added iron palisades for safety. Even that bridge suffered, with flash flooding knocking part of it down in eighteen fifty-five.

Then came the version beside you. Brothers John and James Fraser of Leeds designed it, and John knew railway bridges inside out. They lifted this bridge eleven feet higher than the old one so the Halifax and Ovenden Joint Railway could run beneath the northern end, with North Bridge Station stretching under it. That is such a classic Victorian move... solve traffic, rail travel, and civic pride all at once.

The opening on the twenty-fifth of October, eighteen seventy-one turned gloriously chaotic. The town got a half-day holiday, crowds flooded the bridge before the mayor arrived, police tried to clear space, yeomanry rode in, twenty dragoons blocked the entrance, and after speeches from local grandees and visiting mayors, the ceremony ended with an artillery salute. Halifax did not do quiet ribbon-cuttings.

If you want the bigger picture, look at the app image showing North Bridge beside Burdock Way. That modern flyover took the heaviest traffic in nineteen seventy-three, letting this older bridge settle into local service. Before that, trams rattled across here too, and in nineteen oh-six one runaway double-decker overturned on the bridge, killing two people and injuring eleven.

This bridge is not just a crossing; it is Halifax engineering, ambition, and nerve in one grand span.

Take a final look at those Gothic details, and when you're ready, we can head on to Phoenix Radio.

On your left, look for a sturdy honey-colored stone mill building with long rows of rectangular windows and a Phoenix Radio sign marking the entrance.

This is where Halifax found its own voice. Phoenix Radio sits here in the Dean Clough complex, and that location feels perfect: an old mill setting, once built for industry, now sending out music, talk, argument, laughter, and local pride across Calderdale.

Phoenix began as an idea in nineteen ninety-eight. At first, it worked through six restricted service licences, or R-S-Ls, which are short-term permits that let a station broadcast for limited runs. During those early years it popped up on one hundred and six point two F-M and one hundred and seven point two F-M, proving that local people wanted something made for them, not just for a giant region.

Then came the breakthrough. In two thousand and five, OFCOM, the Office of Communications, awarded Phoenix a full-time community radio licence on ninety-six point seven F-M. On Monday the tenth of December, two thousand and seven, at seven A-M, the station launched officially, and the Mayor of Calderdale opened it. That made Phoenix Calderdale’s first full-time local radio station, a huge moment for a place with its own accent, its own humor, its own stories, and very definitely its own opinions.

What I love most is that Phoenix never treated radio as just entertainment. The station pulled in support from the Prince’s Trust and other charities, then taught young people radio production, interviewing, and studio skills while they worked toward Youth Achievement Awards. Later, with help from the European Social Fund and the Learning and Skills Council, it created the Phoenix Radio Empower Project for people aged sixteen to twenty-five. Local and national producers Alan Hinton and Marc Smith helped teach it, and Phoenix even became the first station in the country to use C-D-ROM portfolios for that award. That is pure community radio energy: not just giving people a microphone, but showing them how to use it.

And the sound coming out of here is gloriously wide. Phoenix runs twenty-four hours a day on F-M, on D-A-B plus, and online around the world. You get music from the nineteen fifties to brand-new local tracks, plus conversations about housing, education, sport, disabilities, jobs, and local politics. On Saturday nights, Phoenix F-M Dance takes over, and before that, local D-J Danny Bond’s live specialist dance show became famous for listeners cheekily trying to trick him into reading fake shout-outs on air.

Today, the studios stay here at Dean Clough, while the transmitter on Calderdale College carries the signal; car radios even display the station name as P-H-O-E-N-I-X. If you want to visit in person, the office generally opens Monday to Friday from nine A-M to five P-M and closes on weekends.