The Kirk Work Talk

In 2025, Rosalind Arden and I led a walk around Dewsbury for Heritage Open Days to publicise the restoration of the Arcade – work that is now nearing completion – and to look at the other buildings in the town by the Arcade's  designer, Albert Holmes Kirk. We called it the Kirk Work Walk. For this lecture, I’ve decided to retain the format of a physical progress around the town and so – by the substitution of a single letter – have re-invented it as the Kirk Work Talk.

I’m going to set the architect’s work in its broadest historical context – to succumb whenever I’m tempted to digress! – and to use that work as a prism through which to view the history of the town.

As far as possible I’m going to be illustrating the talk with my own photographs. However, I’m also using some images – like this one – which I’ve borrowed from Jaye Aziz’s excellent ‘Dewsbury: Today and Back in t’Day’ Facebook group, and if anyone here recognises their own pictures I’d like to take this opportunity to thank them.

Dewsbury Railway Station

We started the walk on the railway station forecourt. Some people, we thought, would arrive by train and others could leave their cars in the station car park. Early arrivals might like to wait in the comfort of the West Riding. Mostly though, we were thinking that the physical form Dewsbury still largely retains was dictated by the arrival of the railway in 1848 and so it would be an appropriate place to begin.

In 1845 the Leeds, Dewsbury and Manchester Railway had been incorporated by an Act of Parliament to build a line from Manchester to Leeds via Huddersfield and Dewsbury. The route chosen had required the construction of embankments sixty feet high and cuttings even deeper than that. The Leeds Intelligencer, in its report of 5 August 1848, suggested that ‘the eminent and much respected chief engineer, Mr. Grainger’ had ‘immortalised himself’.

Dewsbury station was built on a hillside and on that same 1852 map you can see Eightlands House higher up the slope, not yet surrounded by terraced housing, but with part of its garden sliced off by the railway cutting. This photograph shows the station at bottom right and the huge goods shed with its landmark water tower. The aerial perspective flattens the view, but you can see the way that Wellington Road curls around as it follows the contour of the hillside. It was laid out to service the station and named after the duke – victor of Waterloo and Tory Prime Minister – who died in September 1852.

Period photograph showing Wellington Road, Dewsbury

The steepness of the slope is easier to appreciate in this photograph, taken before Wellington Road was widened in 1987. From the left, you are looking at the Pioneer building, the huge retaining wall where part of the hillside has been cut away, the goods shed with its water tower and, at the back, one end of Howgate House with its recognisable corner pinnacle.

Howgate House, 3 Wellington Road East

This picture was taken just a few feet to the right of where the last one was. The Pioneer Building is still there, but the goods shed has gone and so has another great chunk of the hillside. Though there’s a lot of ugly street furniture and other gubbins, you do now have a good view from street level of Howgate House’s magnificent prow-like frontage.

I think that it was originally designed to make a dramatic impression on visitors arriving from Leeds and seeing it for the first time as their train rattled in over the viaduct. In 1860 an established Huddersfield architect, John Kirk, spotted an opportunity and opened a branch in Dewsbury. He took his twenty-year-old son Albert into partnership and put him in charge of the new office. Howgate House was one of his first big jobs, in 1863. It was quite a calling card, and over the next three decades he was able to put his personal stamp on the appearance of the town centre.

Architect’s impression of Station Apartments, 15 Wellington Road East

Howgate House and Field House, opposite the railway station at 15 Wellington Road East, ‘bookend’ a spectacular range of buildings – deemed to be ‘of national importance’ by Historic England – and conceived as a ‘shop window’ for the town. They literally set in stone the relationship – both practical and visual – between Dewsbury and the railway.  Field House was built in 1860 for John Oldroyd the carpet manufacturer. Now renamed Station Apartments, it has just been beautifully restored and converted to ‘high-end’ flats.

Dewsbury Business Centre, 11 and 13 Wellington Road East and 26 Bond Street

In 1870 these buildings – now numbered as 11 and 13 Wellington Road East and 26 Bond Street, and called the Dewsbury Business Centre – belonged to Day, Howgate & Co. After 1872, the Kirk practice was responsible for additions to their mill complex, the huge, steam-powered Calder Bank Mills, that had been established on a site between the river and the railway to the south-east of the town in 1861.

Period photograph of George Stross Ltd, 11 and 13 Wellington Road East and 26 Bond Street

By 1887 those town centre premises had been taken over by the Berlin rag merchant Frederick Wutow, and by the mid-20th century by George Stross, as you can see from this evocative period photograph.

19 Croft Street

This is 19 Croft Street, built in 1870 for M&W Thackrah. The arched entrance leads to a covered yard shared with 24 Bond Street, the road running parallel at the rear. Both buildings were designed by Albert Holmes Kirk and were intended to function as one. They too were later taken over by Frederick Wutow.

Period photograph of warehouses on Wellington Road

The completion of this magnificent group of buildings marked the high tide of Dewsbury’s prosperity and almost immediately a slow decline set in. But at the time they were erected their owners clearly had so much money they almost didn’t know what to do with it. It speaks volumes about their sense of their own importance that the principal architectural models followed by their architects – for what was after all just a row of wholesale wool warehouses – were the palazzi of the merchant princes of Renaissance Italy. The fact that we’re not really standing beside Wellington Road – and that I’m not struggling to make myself heard over the noise of traffic – means that I can digress now, in a way that I couldn’t on the walk last year, and try to explain how we got here before we set off.

Minster Church of All Saints, Dewsbury

Dewsbury was once the centre of a huge parish that stretched beyond Bradford and Huddersfield. Paulinus, the first Bishop of York, preached here in the year 627. The Parish Church of All Saints – designated a Minster in 1994 – contains some Saxon stonework, as well as parts dating to the 13th and 15th centuries.

The tower and the north aisle were built in a very elegant Georgian style around 1767 by John Carr, from Horbury, who was the most important architect working in the North of England at that time. The Victorian Gothic extension – built during 1884-88, to plans by Arthur Edmund Street (son of the great church architect George Edmund Street) and Albert Holmes Kirk – is distinguishable by the shape of the windows and the colour of the stone.

The Moot Hall, Dewsbury

It must be admitted that Dewsbury has sometimes been careless with its distinguished architectural heritage, and this is one reason why projects like the Arcade restoration are so important. The Moot Hall – an almost unique medieval survival – was demolished as recently as 1962 to make way for the dual carriageway ring road. It may have been inevitable, but if the railway ‘made’ the town the all-conquering motor-car has certainly helped to wreck it.

The Mechanics’ Institute, originally the County Court, on Church Street, Dewsbury

The Moot Hall wasn’t the only casualty. The 1852 map of the town identifies this building at the bottom of Church Street, opposite the end of Vicarage Road, as the County Court. It was one of the first to be established after the modern civil justice system was introduced by the County Courts Act of 1846.

A new use was found for it after 1860, when County Court proceedings were moved to newly built premises up on Eightlands Road. Kelly’s Directory of the West Riding of Yorkshire states in 1881 that the Mechanics Institute, ‘situated at the bottom of Church Street’, was ‘a stone structure, purchased of her Majesty’s Lords of the Treasury for £1,300’ which included ‘a large lecture-room … three classrooms, a chess room, a library’ – containing about 1,400 volumes – ‘and an excellent news-room, with daily supplies of the London and provincial newspapers’, but it too stood in the way of progress and was swept aside.

The old Vicarage, Dewsbury

Nearby – once more according to Kelly’s Directory – was the Church Institute, which had ‘a good library of about 1,700 volumes, with news rooms, reading-room and chess-room’, housed in what had once been the vicarage. In this capacity the old house – built in 1350 – continued to serve the people of Dewsbury until it was demolished at around the time the church was extended.

Castellated gates on Stonefield Street, Dewsbury

The Church of England had bought another property – on the large plot now occupied by the new police headquarters on Halifax Road – to serve as the vicarage. All that survives of it are these castellated gates on Stonefield Street. According to the Dewsbury Chronicle for 22 May 1880 John Kirk & Sons tendered for the job of enlarging the house.

It was originally built to be his own home by James Nowell, who owned fifty acres of land just outside Dewsbury, which was sold off in separate lots after the death of his widow, Tabitha, in 1864. The name of Nowell Street, running between Oxford Road and West Park Street, is almost all that remains to commemorate him.

Lissadell House, County Sligo

The Nowells were a notable local family. According to the Dewsbury Reporter for 30 July 1932, ‘Jonathan Nowell, born at Dewsbury … on February 6th 1757 … was by trade a stonemason, builder, and quarry owner’. Westtown used to be dotted with quarries and there is still a street there called Nowell’s Yard. Jonathan, according to the article, ‘had three sons who are known to have been stonemasons and builders’, but this description hardly does them justice.

The eldest, Joseph, was the head of Joseph Nowell & Sons, civil engineers and contractors, who built tunnels and bridges – the infrastructure of the industrial age – all over Britain. And among many other projects, James, the youngest brother, built Lissadell House near Sligo.

The house was designed by the London architect Francis Goodwin and is famous as the childhood home of gun-toting Irish revolutionary Constance Markievicz and for its connection with the poet WB Yeats.

Constance Markievicz and WB Yeats

16-18 Market Place

Elements of Dewsbury’s present-day street plan reflect the existence of a market town dating back to the 13th century, when woollen cloth production was still entirely domestic in scale. The long-established market for local clothiers was closed – after outbreaks of plague in 1593 and 1603 – and not reopened until 1741, which is arguably the start-date of the history of modern Dewsbury. The Market Place is overlooked by the two surviving bays of a high-status 18th century building that was probably a merchant’s house, and is one of very few pre-19th century structures left in the town centre.

Period postcard of the River Calder at Dewsbury

It was the advent of new modes of bulk transportation that transformed the modest medieval township into an industrial powerhouse, and the first step-change occurred just under a quarter of a century after the reopening of the market. Turnpike roads connecting the town with Halifax, Elland and Wakefield had already been established, but it was the construction of the Calder and Hebble Navigation in 1764 that unleashed industrial development.

It enabled the town to import large quantities of raw wool and coal for new, vastly more productive, steam-driven mills. By connecting sections of navigable river with canals it gave Dewsbury access to Wakefield, Leeds, Hull and the North Sea via the Aire and Calder Navigation and the Rivers Ouse and Humber.

Joseph Pinder, the Last of the Kilpin Hill Handloom Weavers (1903)

It was the advent of new modes of bulk transportation that transformed the modest medieval township into an industrial powerhouse, and the first step-change occurred just under a quarter of a century after the reopening of the market. Turnpike roads connecting the town with Halifax, Elland and Wakefield had already been established, but it was the construction of the Calder and Hebble Navigation in 1764 that unleashed industrial development.

It enabled the town to import large quantities of raw wool and coal for new, vastly more productive, steam-driven mills. By connecting sections of navigable river with canals it gave Dewsbury access to Wakefield, Leeds, Hull and the North Sea via the Aire and Calder Navigation and the Rivers Ouse and Humber.

Before industrialisation it had been common practice for small clothiers to employ a number of journeymen weavers, who worked at their own looms in their own homes. ‘The weavers as a class were poor’, Joseph Greenwood recalled in Reminiscences of Sixty Years Ago in 1909, ‘but they had their good times, the dwellings being on rising ground where they got the early sunshine in its splendour and where the atmosphere was not fouled by the smoke of the factory. There was no bell to ring them up at four or five o’clock in the morning nor again at noon, nor were they bound to stay late at night; there was freedom to start and stay away as they cared.’ Those traditional arrangements only gave way gradually to the factory system.

In 1858, an inventory of Dewsbury Mills revealed that, while it employed twenty-three ‘in-weavers’ operating twenty-six looms, it also had one hundred and two ‘out-weavers’ on its books using equipment owned by the Mill in their own homes. One of them, John Ellis, is listed as controlling sixteen looms, so he must have been sub-contracting to other men. Sturdy independence, intransigence and self-respect were characteristic of this class.

According to Frank Peel, a local historian writing in the Cleckheaton Guardian in 1884, the clothiers ‘were men who doffed their caps to no-one, and recognised no right in either squire or parson to question, or meddle with them … their brusqueness and plain speaking might at times be offensive … If the little maker … rose in the world high enough to employ a few of his neighbours, he did not therefore cease to labour with his own hands, but worked as hard or perhaps harder than anyone he employed. In speech and in dress he claimed no superiority.’

As late as 1903 – when he was painted for a picture that is now a part of the Kirklees Collection, The Last of the Kilpin Hill Handloom Weavers – Joseph Pinder was still making blankets in the old-fashioned way at his cottage two miles north-west of Dewsbury, and continued to do so until his death in 1910.

Plate II ‘Cloth-Makers’ from The Costume of Yorkshire (1814) by George Walker

This is plate II, ‘Cloth Makers’, from Costume of Yorkshire by George Walker, which was published in 1814. Walker was a painter and naturalist, born at Killingbeck Hall near Seacroft, a few miles to the north-east of Leeds, in 1781. He was a close friend of the famous Squire Waterton, who established what is thought to be the first wildfowl and nature reserve on his estate at Walton Hall near Wakefield. The plates and brief text of the book paint a vivid picture of life in the county at a moment of transition, and no fewer than seven of the forty illustrations refer to the textile industry.

‘The manufacture of cloth’, according to the text that accompanies this picture, ‘affords employment to the major part of the lower class of people in the north-west districts of the West Riding of Yorkshire. These cloth-makers reside almost entirely in the villages’ – Dewsbury in 1814 had yet to become much more than that – ‘and bring their cloth on market-days for sale in the great halls erected for that purpose at Leeds and Huddersfield.’

Plate XXVIII ‘The Cloth Hall’ from The Costume of Yorkshire (1814) by George Walker

‘About half a century ago’, he wrote beside this picture of the Coloured Cloth Hall in Leeds that had been built in 1767, ‘the Yorkshire broad cloth was exposed for sale, on market days, on the bridge and in the principal street at Leeds. Since that time two commodious halls have been erected; the one for the sale of white cloth only, the other for coloured’. He says they were open on Tuesday and Saturday mornings for just an hour, during which short time all business had to be completed.

Cover of The Making of the English Working Class by EP Thompson (Pelican Books, 1968)

Plate III ‘The Collier’ from The Costume of Yorkshire (1814) by George Walker

The illustration shows the eponymous collier in front of a slag heap and ‘the steam engine lately invented by Mr Blenkinsop, agent at the colliery of Charles Brandling, Esquire, near Leeds, which conveys above twenty wagons loaded with coals from the pits to Leeds’.

Plate XXXVI ‘Factory Children’ from The Costume of Yorkshire (1814) by George Walker

Several plates – ‘The Cloth-Dresser’, ‘The Teasel Field’ and ‘Woman Spinning’, for example – show scenes of cottage industry that can have changed very little since medieval times, but Plate XXXVI, ‘Factory Children’, represents two grubby child workers in front of a large mill building. The situation is rural and the factory stands in a steep-sided river valley – that of the fast-flowing Holme, Colne or Calder, probably – one of those to the south and west of Huddersfield or Halifax, through which the rivers run down from the Pennines.

A mill on such a site will once have been water-powered, but now smoke is belching from its tall chimney, the sky is dark and in the foreground beside the children stands a blighted tree. Walker’s book represents Yorkshire – socially, technologically and environmentally – at a time of rapid change. Britain has emerged victorious from more than two decades of war and the Industrial Revolution is in full swing. Much that was traditional still survives but the lunar landscape of ‘The Collier’ and the ominous bulk of the mill in ‘Factory Children’ point to a very different future.

Detail of Ordnance Survey map of Wakefield (1888)

If you’d been standing on the spot where we started the walk soon after the publication of Costume of Yorkshire – say if you were one of the de-mobbed soldiers who flooded the labour market after the end of the war – you’d have been on an open hillside looking down towards the edge of town, which was still where it had been in medieval times, at the north side of Daisy Hill. (Incidentally, that pretty name always makes me think of William Morris’s lines from The Earthly Paradise:

Forget six counties overhung with smoke,

Forget the snorting steam and piston-stroke,

Forget the spreading of the hideous town;

Think rather of the pack-horse on the down,

And dream of London, small, and white, and clean,

The clear Thames bordered by its gardens green.

Dewsbury too was once small, white and clean, nestling amid hills clad with wildflowers, and even the Calder once ran clear). And if you’d looked away to your left you’d have seen, just this side of Malkroyd Lane – present-day Halifax Road – a rectangular plot with a house on it. It’s still there on the 1852 Ordnance Survey map, marked ‘Vicar’s Croft’. This is a detail from the Ordnance Survey map of Wakefield published in 1893. In 1764, according to the Local Studies Library, ‘the church graveyard being full, the vicar at the time allowed burials to take place in his field, adjoining the Springs’. 

Red House, Gomersal

The Yorkshire Historical Dictionary definition of ‘croft’ quotes a 1554 tithe dispute: ‘thos be onelye Croftes and called Croftes which have a house belded apon thiem or joyninge to thiem or to be joyned to a house and inclosed from other common feldes’. There is a reference too in Charlotte Brontë’s Shirley, published in 1849 but set in 1812 in a place based on Gomersal where she had stayed with her friend Mary Taylor.

The townsfolk are gathering for a Whitsun parade: ‘Not only is the churchyard full, but the Rectory-garden is also thronged: pairs and parties of ladies and gentlemen are seen walking among the waving lilacs and laburnums. The house also is occupied: at the wide-open parlour-windows gay groups are standing. These are the patrons and teachers, who are to swell the procession. In the parson’s croft, behind the Rectory, are the musicians of the three parish bands, with their instruments.’ We’ll come back to Vicar’s Croft in Dewsbury when we arrive at its location on our walk.

The Leader of the Luddites (hand-coloured etching, 1812)

The Reporter Building

Entrance, Dewsbury Union Offices, Wellington Street

So do those of the Dewsbury Union on the other side of the road. The Union administered poor relief via the hated workhouse system in Dewsbury and ten other associated townships after the passage of the Poor Law Amendment Act in 1834. Its enforcement provoked the worst riots in Dewsbury’s history and troops had to be summoned to suppress them.

The present building was erected in about 1890 on the site of the courthouse and police-cells built there in 1845 and demolished in 1889 when their functions were relocated to the newly built Town Hall. The building served as Dewsbury’s Registry Office until recently.  

The former site of Aldams Mill

At the bottom of the road, we’re looking towards perhaps the most significant site in the history of the town. The war with Revolutionary and Napoleonic France during 1793-1815 had come at a most unfortunate point in the social and industrial development of the United Kingdom. The governing class’s response to events on the other side of the Channel – an illiberal, anti-Jacobin reaction to any proposal for reform, or any expression of sympathy for the plight of the poor or the rights of the new urban working class – helped to shape emerging towns like Dewsbury.

‘The modern English slum town’, as GM Trevelyan put it rather bluntly in his English Social History, ‘grew up to meet the momentary needs of the new type of employer and jerry-builder, unchecked and unguided by public control of any sort’ and ‘the circumstances of the Napoleonic period in England were peculiarly unfavourable to the better development of the grim factory towns of the North, and to the relations of the new type of employer to the new type of employee’.

But it also had a particular impact upon the woollen industry and transformed the ‘Heavy Woollen District’ by spurring innovation. Raw material needs had already outstripped available local supply when imports of wool from abroad were interrupted by the French blockade. A partial solution to this problem came in 1813 when Benjamin Law, who had been born in Gomersal in about 1773, invented the rag machine and brought it into use at his brother-in-law’s mill in Batley.

The resulting fabric, called shoddy, was made by grinding down soft fabrics such as stockings, flannels and carpets so that they could be re-spun and combined with new wool. A later improvement – using harder fabrics such as dress coats, tailors’ cuttings and disused tablecloths – produced a finer yarn called mungo. The trade in these recycled fabrics would come to represent the most important phase of the Industrial Revolution in this part of the country. And in 1820 John Halliley installed the new machinery at his mill here, between Aldams Road and Old Westgate.

An early model of a Rag Picker Machine

When it was advertised for sale in 1840 Aldams Mill was described as ‘one of the most complete Woollen Manufactories in the North of England … consisting of a Mill, sixty yards long by thirteen yards wide, and three stories high – with Counting House, three large Warehouses, Press Shops, Wool Chambers, Weaving Shops, lighted with Gas and heated by Steam, Wool and Piece drying house, Engine of fifty horse power, with boilers, shafts and going gear, five Willies, Fourteen Scribblers, Six single and five double Carders, Fourteen Billies, Two Tommies, Two Mules, three Raising Gigs, Ten Fulling Stocks, Three Rag Machines and one Washing Machine, and other machinery’.

The 1852 Ordnance Survey map seems to indicate that the proprietor’s house, ‘The Aldams’, was also part of the mill complex. There is certainly what appears to be a garden, though the house itself is not identified.

Grave marker of John and Leah Halliley in the minster churchyard

The Halliley family had lived in the area since at least 1390, when Thomas Halliley of Sowerby, in the Manor of Wakefield, was recorded as having paid his poll tax. By 1820 his descendant John Halliley – born in Earlsheaton in 1754 – was already the wealthiest mill owner in the area and was known as the ‘King of Dewsbury’. He died in 1828 and his grave marker in the Minster churchyard asserts that ‘his uprightness, benevolence & piety were worthy of universal imitation’.

Reverend Patrick Brontë as a Young Man

Cartouche over the entrance to 3 Wellington Street

Frederick William Reuss in his mayoral robes

The town became a centre of international trade. Its business community was thoroughly cosmopolitan and welcomed migrants from across Europe. German-born Frederick William Reuss, for instance, came to Dewsbury in 1863 to set up a branch for the Paris rag merchants Souchet & Louvet and rented a warehouse in Peel Street, off Bradford Road.

He established his own firm in 1868 and moved into auctioneering in 1873. During the previous decade, rag auctions – as the Textile Manufacturer noted in 1876 – had ‘risen to great importance, many thousands of pounds (sterling) changing hands in an afternoon. Old rags from all parts of the world, German, Swedish, French, and Norwegian shoddy and mungo, all found their way to Dewsbury and passed under the hammers of the auctioneers’.

Reuss acquired the warehouse of Achille Ferrari in 1874 and became a pillar of the community, going on to serve three terms as Mayor between 1908 and 1911.

M, J & G Stross Ltd, Wilton Street

The town became a centre of international trade. Its business community was thoroughly cosmopolitan and welcomed migrants from across Europe. German-born Frederick William Reuss, for instance, came to Dewsbury in 1863 to set up a branch for the Paris rag merchants Souchet & Louvet and rented a warehouse in Peel Street, off Bradford Road.

He established his own firm in 1868 and moved into auctioneering in 1873. During the previous decade, rag auctions – as the Textile Manufacturer noted in 1876 – had ‘risen to great importance, many thousands of pounds (sterling) changing hands in an afternoon. Old rags from all parts of the world, German, Swedish, French, and Norwegian shoddy and mungo, all found their way to Dewsbury and passed under the hammers of the auctioneers’.

Reuss acquired the warehouse of Achille Ferrari in 1874 and became a pillar of the community, going on to serve three terms as Mayor between 1908 and 1911.

We’ve already referred to George Stross. His father, Samuel Strassburg, was born in Alsace-Lorraine in 1858 but married and settled in Pabianicz, near Lodz in the Kingdom of Poland, then a client state of Imperial Russia that was undergoing its own industrial revolution.

Rapid expansion of its textile industry had led to a sizable inflow of migrants – many of them Jews and Germans – including the Strassburg family. Samuel and his wife had ten children who all grew up to work in cloth manufacturing. Densely populated and heavily industrialised, Lodz became a centre of the socialist movement, and in 1892 a general strike, mass demonstrations and a pogrom against Jews were bloodily suppressed by the Tsarist army.

In 1905 simmering unrest and a series of strikes culminated in the Lodz Insurrection – a key incident in the Russian Revolution of that year – which was also crushed with hundreds killed and wounded. At around this time the Strassburgs understandably decided to get out. One son having first been sent to explore the opportunities on offer in Britain they moved initially to Macclesfield and then, with two trainloads of Russian rags for start-up, to Dewsbury. 

In 1906, having anglicised their name along the way, they established themselves in a mill at the bottom of Crackenedge Lane. After the war the brothers set themselves up as M, J & G Stross Ltd in this mill on Wilton Street, between the parish church and Savile Bridge. Older residents of the town still remember the foetid odour of the rags, variously describing the mill as ‘black and dirty’ and ‘foul and dank’.

Fabworks Mill Shop

George separated from his brothers and established his own import/export business on Wellington Road. He was succeeded by his son, David, who ran the company during the 1960s, 70s and early 80s while the shoddy trade vanished around him. David’s son Gil, and his two sons, now run Fabworks, which makes an impressive five generations continuously active in the industry.

Women examining old uniforms in October 1917

By 1881 Kelly’s Directory was announcing that Dewsbury could supply ‘heavy and fancy woollens, such as army and navy and police cloths, pilots, Devons, beavers, jerseys, witneys, flushings, feltings, collar checks, baizes, serges, blankets, druggets and rugs’. Beside the woollen mills, there were ‘several large iron foundries, boiler and machine factories, and extensive flour mills’, so the town could supply its own needs for industrial plant and bread for the workers.

Shoddy was particularly well suited to the manufacture of blankets, horse-cloths and military uniforms, and the industry flourished mightily between the beginning of the Crimean War in 1853 and the end of the First World War. At its peak in 1860 – when John Kirk opened his Dewsbury office – fifteen of the twenty-three mills in the town had belonged to shoddy manufacturers. Towards the end of the 19th century Mark Oldroyd & Sons – one of the largest conglomerates – owned mills not only in Dewsbury and Leeds, but also in Germany and Silesia, and had their own coal mines in Castleford. And as we’ve seen, several German businesses also established branches in the town.

Someone once said that a bayonet was an industrial product with a worker on either end, and there must similarly have been conflicts when the troops facing one another were all dressed in uniforms made from cloth supplied by Dewsbury-based firms. Of course, this cozy situation changed in 1914, but the Great War was a very busy time for the shoddy mills.

Between June 1916 and June 1918 the Army Clothing Salvage Depot at Dewsbury received fifty million worn-out military garments – some taken from the bodies of the slain – for recycling. This photograph from the Imperial War Museum shows women examining old uniforms in October 1917. Those beyond repair were turned back into cloth and the others were sent to the cleaning department and then to the tailors to be made serviceable again. The total value of resulting sales – most of them straight back to the army – was £2,327,218. Dewsbury must certainly have had its share of ‘hard-faced men who did well out of the war’.

100% Virgin Wool

When the armies were demobbed in 1918 there was an overwhelming, sudden influx of material from redundant uniforms into the supply chain and as ‘Spanish Flu’ swept through Europe there was a moral panic about the link between recycling and contagion.

Suppliers of new wool introduced the advertising concept of ‘virgin wool’ to distinguish it from the compromised ‘shoddy’ product. Disarmament during the inter-war years struck the industry a mortal blow just as the internal combustion engine eliminated the need for horse cloths. It enjoyed a temporary respite during the Second World War, but was almost at its last gasp when it provided uniforms for the conflict in Aden during 1963-67.

Then the widespread modern preference for duvets killed the mass-market in blankets. 

3 Wellington Street and the Centenary Chapel

Opposite Bielefeld & Wertheim’s warehouse, but fronting onto Daisy Hill, stands the Centenary Chapel, built in 1839 by Thomas Gomersall to commemorate John Wesley’s historic first visit to the area. Methodism – with its ethos of sobriety, earnestness and diligence – played an important part in Dewsbury’s history, and the town has a not unimportant place in the history of Methodism, which left it a significant architectural legacy in return.

In 1739 John Nelson, an itinerant Yorkshire stonemason, heard Wesley preach in London. He returned to his hometown of Birstall and founded a Methodist society there in 1741, the year the market reopened in Dewsbury. Wesley himself came to the West Riding in 1742 to encourage him in the work, the first of many visits to the area, and in 1751 found ‘the societies of Yorkshire, chiefly under the care of John Nelson, ... all alive, strong and vigorous of soul ... and increased in number from 1,800 to upwards of 3,000’.

I would guess Nelson Street was actually named in his honour. The bottom of Wellington Road, which it adjoins, used to be called Wesley Lane, and he must in any case have presented a more congenial role model to the sober burghers of Dewsbury than the flamboyant admiral might have done.

Centenary Chapel, Daisy Hill

William Bramwell began preaching after he met Wesley in 1781. He was appointed to the Dewsbury Circuit in 1791, and such was the effectiveness of his ministry that within a year the spiritual awakening he sparked in the town had spread throughout West Yorkshire. When the congregation outgrew his old chapel in Westgate the larger Centenary Chapel was built to replace it, together with an adjacent house for the minister. Gomersall probably built several similar dwellings along Daisy Hill at the same time.

Period photograph of Daisy Hill

This narrow, winding lane – with Westgate and the market place – constitutes the surviving footprint of medieval Dewsbury. As the 19th century wore on, the ground floors of houses were converted one-by-one into shops, and some small warehouses built behind them. This process has gone into reverse in recent years and what was once a bustling retail area is now a purely residential one again, and a sadly run-down one at that.

63 Daisy Hill

Before we turn left again onto Grove Street we might pause to note the building on the corner opposite at 63 Daisy Hill. Unassuming as it may be, it is an 18th century survival and one of the oldest structures in the town.
(Editor's note: currently purchased by the council to secure and make weatherproof until a developer takes on the job of completing the interior. The street art on the security shutters is part of the council regeneration effort)

The Howlands Centre

We should also peer down School Street and glimpse the building – the town’s second ‘National School’ and now the Howlands Centre – erected by the Church of England’s National Society for Promoting Religious Education in 1843.

To the extent that the famous ‘battle of the styles’ played out in Dewsbury at all, the Renaissance palazzo had it mostly its own way. The dissenting chapels followed loosely classical models and the Established Church seems to have been almost the only local client asking for gothic. The school is one of the few surviving examples in the town centre.

We should probably be careful not to exaggerate the extent to which different architectural styles embody particular meanings, but ‘pointed’, Gothic architecture does imply continuity with a mostly imaginary medieval past and makes an appeal to supposed eternal verities. It used to be said that the Church of England represented ‘the Conservative Party at prayer’, and perhaps Dewsbury – Liberal in politics and Methodist in religion – had other ideals.

Interior, Holy Trinity, Batley Carr

Certainly when John Buckworth – a passionate Evangelical – became vicar in 1807 the parish church – then the only Anglican foundation in the town – was often barely half full, but his missionary zeal and powerful preaching soon repaired the situation.

During his ministry and after his death in 1835 the congregation continued to grow and soon it was decided that new ‘overflow’ churches were required. This is the interior of Holy Trinity, Batley Carr, built in 1841 and designed by Robert Dennis Chantrell (the architect responsible for Leeds Parish Church)

St Matthew, Huddersfield Road, and St Paulinus

And that’s St Matthew, Huddersfield Road – built in 1848 and designed by Ignatius Bonomi and John Augustus Cory – beyond St Paulinus, which was designed by Edward Welby Pugin, the short-lived but prolific son of Augustus Welby Northmore Pugin, and built to serve the growing Roman Catholic community.

St Paulinus from the riverside path

‘Railway mania’ gripped England and created an insatiable need for migrant labourers. During this period – according to the National Railway Museum – more than a quarter of a million workers, a force bigger than the Army and Navy combined, laid 3,000 miles of track. Fr Edward O’Leary celebrated the first public mass in Dewsbury since the Reformation on Palm Sunday of 1841. St Paulinus was built in 1871 at a cost of £7,000, which had been ‘principally raised through the exertions of the Rev WR Kenny’, who was the parish priest from 1865-85. This is the view from the riverside path, across the railway and an area that used to be occupied by industry.

24 Bond Street, at the top of Grove Street

4 Grove Street

Half way up the street, at number 4, are the salerooms he designed in 1878 for the auctioneer William Frederick Fox. As prosperity grew, an emerging local bourgeoisie and an increasingly comfortable upper working class required expanded shopping opportunities. The auction-house was a way station in the evolving history of retail in the town, and Fox could sell you anything from houses to horses and everything in between.

It also reflected a stage in its development reached by local transport infrastructure. If you were working class, moving house generally only involved getting your few sticks of furniture a few streets away and a local carter would be able to do that for you. If you were a member of the new bourgeoisie, however, you might well be moving to another town and your furniture and fittings would be much more substantial. In that case it would still have been more practical to sell everything and replace it in your new hometown, which is where local auction houses came in.

Removal firms with their fleets of lorries could not exist until after the invention of the internal combustion engine and the enhanced road network that came with it.

Busts of William Frederick Fox and George Fearnley on the frontage of 4 Grove Street

At around the same time that he installed the rag grinding machines in his mill John Halliley had handed The Aldams over to his son, John Halliley Jr, and built himself a fine new house on the sloping ground above Daisy Hill, which he will have been able to buy at a good price during the severe agricultural depression that followed the war, when British farmers were exposed once more to competition from abroad.

Grove House, as the new place was called, had a large garden, and he will have been able to enjoy a bucolic existence there until his death in 1828. Leah, his widow, lived in the house until she followed him in 1841, and as we’ve seen, they’re buried together in the churchyard at the Minster. With the coming of the railway the land between Daisy Hill and the station will suddenly have acquired development potential.

The Leeds, Dewsbury and Manchester Railway built the line and then leased it in 1847 to the London and North Western Railway, who opened it the following year. They seem to have acquired Grove House from the Halliley estate, then, in 1851, sold some surplus land, including the house and its gardens, to a Dr Fearnley. The left-hand portrait bust on the façade of William Frederick Fox’s salerooms represents their proprietor. The other one is George Fearnley.

George Fearnley (1812-64), MD, First Mayor of Dewsbury (1864)

 His father-in-law had ‘a highly respectable practice’, which he ran from a house behind a chemist’s shop, also in Westgate, and George took it over when he retired. At around this time, aged twenty-nine and newly established in the town’s business community, he was invited to join the local Masonic Lodge.

He rose through the degrees to become Deputy Provincial Grand Master of West Yorkshire and Senior Grand Deacon of England. This portrait, from the Kirklees collection, shows him in full regalia. It was painted in 1862 by Samuel Howell, a Huddersfield-based artist and Mason who had served as Master of a Lodge in London and exhibited at the Royal Academy. According to his obituary in The Huddersfield Daily Chronicle he had been an early member of the Lodge of Harmony in that town, where ‘he was much esteemed by the brotherhood’.

Masonic Temple, Halifax Road

John Kirk was also a senior Mason in Huddersfield and his son followed him into ‘the craft’ as a member of Dewsbury’s Lodge of Three Grand Principles. In 1866 the practice was responsible for this Masonic Temple, built for the St John’s Lodge just outside the town centre at the junction of Halifax Road and Stonefield Street, which is still in use.

Period photograph of Long Causeway, Dewsbury, showing the Masonic Hall

John Kirk was also a senior Mason in Huddersfield and his son followed him into ‘the craft’ as a member of Dewsbury’s Lodge of Three Grand Principles. In 1866 the practice was responsible for this Masonic Temple, built for the St John’s Lodge just outside the town centre at the junction of Halifax Road and Stonefield Street, which is still in use.

Since 1844, his own lodge had been meeting in a former Sunday School on Long Causeway – this was presumably the ‘Freemasons’ Hall’ shown on the 1852 Ordnance Survey map – and he was given the job of designing a grand new building for them. The result, a hefty, foursquare structure that showed he could handle Gothic when he needed to, opened in 1867.

Period photograph of Long Causeway, Dewsbury, showing the Masonic Hall

It was demolished to make way for the Princess of Wales Precinct.

Caricature of Sir John Simon, Dewsbury’s first MP (Vanity Fair, 25 September 1886)

At the same time, the nation-wide agitation for an extension of the franchise, which had only briefly abated after the Great Reform Act of 1832, came to a head once again.

The death in 1865 of the Liberal Prime Minister, Lord Palmerston, opened the floodgates. Aged eighty when he finally passed away, he had been a stubborn opponent of change, but his successor, Earl Russell, immediately introduced a reform bill. When it failed and he resigned his administration was replaced by a minority Conservative government with Lord Derby at its head.

This was led in the Commons by Benjamin Disraeli, who – hoping to be rewarded at the ballot-box by a grateful electorate – passed a Bill of his own, the Representation of the People Act of 1867. It doubled to two million – out of a total of seven million – the adult males in England and Wales who were eligible to vote and included a modest redistribution of seats.

Dewsbury was one of eleven newly enfranchised boroughs. The new constituency – which returned a single member – was more extensive than the municipal borough, and comprised Dewsbury, Batley, and portions of the townships of Soothill, Mirfield and Thornhill. Derby retired early in 1868 for reasons of health but Disraeli, who inherited the leadership of the party, served only briefly as Prime Minister. The hopes he had entertained were dashed when, in the General Election later that year, the Liberals were returned again with a majority.

Dewsbury itself elected a Liberal – this man, Sir John Simon – as its first MP and he held the seat until his retirement twenty years later.

Batley and Dewsbury Magistrates’ Court, Grove Street

George Fearnley lived at Grove House from 1851 until his death in 1864. The 1852 map shows the considerable plot occupied by the house and its gardens stretching all the way from Daisy Hill to Wellington Road and the house itself alongside the 1839 Centenary Chapel and the 1845 Wellington Street Court House.

Between it and Wellington Road, on that side, there are formal gardens and summerhouses but on the other, where the property abuts Vicar’s Croft, is an area – comprising about a third of the whole site – left blank. The map shows a gateway into this space from the gardens and a path around its periphery. There are buildings behind Thomas Gomersall’s houses on Daisy Hill that are probably a coach house and stables, so it seems reasonable to assume that the unmarked area is a paddock for horses.

 When the road was first laid out across the gardens, after the mayor’s death, it was named Fearnley Street in his honour and what remained of the estate was offered for sale in fifteen separate lots. By 1870 the house was occupied by another doctor, William Connon, and a map of that year shows it hemmed in by new building. It was finally demolished in about 1885.

The 1894 Ordnance Survey map shows its site occupied by a ‘constabulary station’, which made way in turn for the new Magistrates’ Court, which was demolished and replaced in 1989 by this modern building – originally the Batley and Dewsbury Magistrates’ Court but since 2016 a banqueting suite – that occupies the site today.

Buildings on the corner of Bond Street and Union Street

At the top of the hill we’re in the middle of what was John Halliley’s paddock, in that undeveloped quadrant of the Grove House estate, and as we turn right, down Bond Street, we’re walking into Vicar’s Croft. By the mid-19th century what was once a farmstead attached to the Vicarage had transformed into an urban slum with some very undesirable occupants.

On 21 May 1842, for instance, the Leeds Times had printed a story under the headline ‘Caution to Termagants’. ‘Mary Ann Mitchell’, it said, ‘wife of James Mitchell, of Vicar’s Croft, Dewsbury, who has been several times brought up for scandal, was on Tuesday brought before T Wheatley, Esq, for having indecently abused Sarah Norfolk. She was committed for six months to the House of Correction for want of bail.’

Less than two years later, on 14 September 1844, the address was in the news again when one of the children set the house on fire and disaster was only narrowly averted. This is speculation on my part, and I’ve seen no suggestion of it anywhere else, but comparing the ground-plan and position of these low-rise buildings with the 1852 map I’m pretty sure they’re the ones that stood in the middle of the farmyard. They have a new roof, and the shop-fronts are a later addition, but I think they may constitute a historic relic of old Dewsbury. 

Period photograph of Spinkwell Mill from the bottom of Halifax Road

We’ll turn left into Union Street and then left again into Croft Street – the origin of whose name we now understand – and walk up past the archway entrance to the covered yard that served 19 Croft Street and 24 Bond Street. At the top of the hill we’ll turn right onto Wellington Road and walk along it a little way, passing Howgate House.

As we pass Pioneer House and cross Halifax Road, we should look to our left at the large, early 20th century building on the other side the railway viaduct. Like so many others it has been converted into flats, but it is all that remains of Mark Oldroyd’s Spinkwell Mill complex. The original water-powered mill, in the valley where the Batley Beck ran down towards Dewsbury – to the north-east of the hillside where John Halliley would build his house – had probably been operational in some form since at least the 1790s, and was developed after 1838 by Mark Oldroyd snr.

By 1850, after the coming of the railway, it was a large, steam-powered woollen factory standing between the roads to Bradford and Halifax, on a considerable site bounded to the north by Commercial Road. A new mill of five storeys and sixteen bays was built for spinning in the early 1860s. The Oldroyd family, as we’ve already heard, eventually controlled an international business empire.

Mark Oldroyd

After a by-election in 1888 he became the town’s second Member of Parliament – and its first home-grown one – inheriting the seat from Sir John Simon and sitting as a Liberal until 1902, when he resigned as an MP to concentrate on his business interests. His parliamentary attendance was infrequent but he was an active member of various trade and industry-related committees, and was knighted in 1909. He lived at ‘Hyrstlands’, a mansion to the north of the town on Track Road. It still stands, but is now the Al-Hikmah Centre.

Salem New Connexion Chapel, Northgate

We’ll turn right, now, into Northgate. On our right is the beautifully proportioned Salem New Connexion chapel, which was designed by William Hill and built on the site of an earlier one in 1863. Alexander Kilham, a close associate of William Bramwell, was an early advocate of the separation of the Methodists from the Anglican Church. In 1797 he was expelled from the Methodist Conference and formed the Methodist New Connexion in Sheffield. It quickly acquired many adherents – in Dewsbury as elsewhere – but Bramwell declined to join. The Wesleyans did eventually split from the Church of England in 1812. By the time the Centenary Chapel on Daisy Hill was sold to the Elim Pentecostal Church in 2010 the New Connexion chapel on Northgate had been a mosque for many years. I wish its present owners were taking better care of it! It’s my favourite building in the town. Dewsbury’s remaining Methodists now share the old Ebenezer Congregational Church on Long Causeway with the United Reform Church.

Cloth Hall Mills, Dewsbury 

On our left is the office front of Cloth Hall Mills. I adore this painting by Noël Spencer. It’s undated but was probably done during the 1940s while he lived and worked in Huddersfield. In 1860 Rand W Machell, a rag and wool merchant, had built a warehouse at 128 Bradford Road to designs by William and Stead Ellis of Leeds and Heckmondwike. In 1874 Robert Fletcher Machell and William Machell – his sons, presumably – moved the business from Bradford Road to this new building.

Office front, Cloth Hall Mills, Foundry Street

Their portrait busts adorn the wall beside those of Richard Cobden MP and Benjamin Disraeli. Cobden was a Liberal free-trader and founder of the Anti-Corn Law League and Disraeli had just become Prime Minister again after winning the General Election of 1874. Their presence on the front of their mill presumably declares that the Machell brothers credited the prosperity of the town to free trade and political representation. William Machell went on to serve as mayor of Dewsbury during 1880-1882. 

Before we move on, I want to say something about the name of the mill, and of Cloth Hall Street, which runs through the middle of the market.

Old Cloth Hall 

You remember what George Walker said about those two clothiers with their pack-horses, bringing their cloth for sale ‘in the great halls erected for that purpose at Leeds and Huddersfield’? There was, he told us, ‘a large circular hall, built by Sir John Ramsden, at Huddersfield, for the sale, principally, of plains, or narrow cloths’. This is a painting of it,

The Old Cloth Hall, from the Kirklees collection. It was designed by Atkinson & Sharp of York and built in 1768, with a second storey being added by Sir John’s son in 1780. It was eventually demolished in 1930. After a period during which Dewsbury’s clothiers had had little choice but to take their produce to these Cloth Halls for sale the town built one of its own.

According to an 1843 directory: ‘for the convenience of the merchants and manufacturers of the town and neighbourhood, a Cloth and Blanket Hall … a large and commodious stone building’, opened in Dewsbury on 12 April 1837. It was open on Wednesdays, ‘when here is also a market for provisions, &c’. It doesn’t seem to have remained in use for long, though. The 1852 Ordnance Survey map shows a building labelled ‘Mechanics’ Institution’ where Cloth Hall Mills now stands, and I think it must be the already-redundant Cloth Hall, repurposed for adult education. And we know that the Mechanics soon moved into better quarters in the old County Court building in Church Street.

By the 1860s, the rapidly increasing volume of cloth changing hands in Dewsbury had outgrown any single building, and by 1864 all the traders listed as using the Ramsdens’ Cloth Hall in Huddersfield came from the other side of the town, from Golcar, Meltham, Saddleworth, Linthwaite, Honley, Slaithwaite, Netherthong and Marsden. Certainly the days when Dewsbury’s clothiers had needed to travel to Leeds or Huddersfield to meet their customers were long-gone and buyers came here, by train, to make their purchases in the warehouses lining Wellington Road.

Pioneer House, before restoration

Heading a few yards down Northgate, we can take in the impressive bulk of Pioneer House, with its imposing clock tower. It had fallen into terrible disrepair, but has recently undergone wholesale restoration. Here it is at its nadir.

The attractive original shop fronts – with their signage fascias that advertise ‘confectionary’ and ‘painting & decorating’ in gilded lettering – have been uncovered and retained. After the Rochdale Society of Equitable Pioneers were set up in 1844 numerous other co-ops were founded in its wake, particularly in the North of England, and Dewsbury was no exception.

The Dewsbury Pioneers Industrial Society was founded in 1857. Pioneer House was constructed as its headquarters and central stores during 1878-80 and extended twice, in 1896 and 1914. The first phase of the building was designed by Henry Holtom and his then partner, John Wreghitt Connon. Holtom’s career demonstrates the seamless connection existing in Dewsbury between business and local politics. As a young man, he had moved here from Stratford-upon-Avon, begun to practice as an architect, and secured election to the Council.

From 1865 he worked with William Bulmer, joining Connon after 1870. They had an office in Bond Street and another at Leeds. It’s tempting to speculate whether John Connon the architect was related to the Dr William Connon who bought Grove House after the death of George Fearnley. Holtom served as Mayor during 1883-4, and after Connon’s retirement in 1883 took George Arthur Fox – with whom he was responsible for the extensions to Pioneer House – as his new partner.

Again, it’s impossible not to wonder whether George Arthur was a relative of the William Frederick Fox for whom Albert Holmes Kirk built the auction rooms in Fearnley Street. Another possible family connection, Thomas Bateman Fox, succeeded Holtom as Mayor and served three terms between 1884 and 1887, years during which Holtom & Fox received the commission to design the Town Hall. George Arthur Fox himself became Mayor in 1895-6. A Joseph Fox was the unsuccessful Conservative candidate for the Dewsbury constituency in the General Election of 1885 and Major Chaley Fox – another doctor – served twice as Mayor between 1904 and 1906.

It certainly looks as if the town was run by a tight-knit group of wealthy families. I wouldn’t be surprised if they had all been Masons, either, and that they all met up in Albert Holmes Kirk’s Masonic Hall on Long Causeway.

Pioneer House has acquired a new identity as the town centre campus of Kirklees College, but in fact the Co-op’s link to education goes all the way back to its roots. The movement always aspired to be more than just a retail business. Even after its early political ambitions had been disappointed, Cooperation – like Methodism – was still one of the engines of working-class agency and emancipation. Store departments were located on the ground floor, but there was also a library, conversation rooms and offices on the first floor and a concert hall – large enough for an orchestra of two-hundred-and-fifty players and an audience of two thousand – on the second. The Dewsbury Pioneers gave 1.25% of their net profits to education and by 1893 had established two libraries and ten reading rooms in the area, offering opportunities for self-improvement to many.

Main entrance, Pioneer House

I want to look at the fancy front door and those two portrait busts.

T Norcliffe, President of the Dewsbury Pioneers Industrial Society, 1876-80, and John J Barstow, Secretary

They have been helpfully identified by Jane Donaldson at the National Co-operative Archive in Manchester as T Norcliffe – with the spectacular whiskers – who was President of the Dewsbury Pioneers Industrial Society from 1876-80, and John J Barstow, who was Secretary at the same time.

Detail of portrait busts over the main entrance, Pioneer House

I think it says something about the mentality of the people running the town – and I don’t know whether to call it sturdy provincial self respect or inward-looking small-town self-absorption – that of the identifiable people represented on Dewsbury buildings – William Frederick Fox, George Fearnley, Robert Fletcher Machell and William Machell, T Norcliffe and John J Barstow – only Cobden and Disraeli are national figures.

6-10 Westgate

At this point on the physical tour of the town it began to dawn on me that I was going on a bit and needed to hurry it up, so we walked briskly past the Market Place pausing only briefly to notice the two grand bank buildings – William Cocking’s Huddersfield Banking Company and the West Riding Union Bank, which is probably by Charles Henry Marriott – facing one another across the square as they have done for nearly a hundred-and-seventy years.

We hurried down Westgate to this elegant shop designed by Albert Holmes Kirk in 1876 as a tailor’s and draper’s for Mark Phillips, whose crisply carved monogram still graces the front. Clearly, the economy could now support substantial, specialist retail outlets. It’s possible that the building’s history mirrors the slow decline of local prosperity, though, because from 1912 until within living memory the building housed a bazaar on the first floor.

Market House Inn, 8 Church Street

On 2 March 1905 the third daughter of Albert Holmes Kirk, Alice Muriel Kirk, married the architect Frederick William Ridgway, who was the son of yet another Mayor of Dewsbury, Matthew Ridgway, who had held the post during 1870-71. This is the Market House Inn, in Church Street, which he designed in 1901.

After Albert Holmes Kirk’s retirement in 1909, his business was merged with that of his son-in-law and traded as Kirk, Sons & Ridgway. When Mark Oldroyd desired to commission two large warehouses – one to replace a building that burned down in 1911 – it was to this final iteration of the Kirk practice that he turned.

The Arcade, Dewsbury, today and back in t’day

And now let’s double back to the Arcade, which Albert Holmes Kirk designed in 1899. It features large corner units at each end and two rows of bijoux shops within. It has housed numerous businesses over the years and had its ups and downs, like the town, but it’s about to enjoy a new lease of life. Those tiny shops under their protective glass canopy seem to embody the idea that shopping needn’t be grimly utilitarian, but might be fun, and I’d like to end on that note of frivolous optimism.