Monument to cloth is among country’s top trading centres
THE RESTORED Piece Hall in Halifax, the monument to the Industrial Revolution described as the Piazza San Marco of Yorkshire, is named today as one of the country’s 10 most significant trade and commerce edifices.
The list, curated by the Victoria and Albert Museum director and former MP Tristram Hunt
inset, is part of a campaign by Historic England to encapsulate the nation’s story in 100 places, sorted into 10 categories.
Earlier this year it identified Sheffield’s Hillsborough Stadium, and a tiny Quaker chapel near Ilkley among the most significant leisure and religious buildings.
The Piece Hall, which Mr Hunt calls “an architectural and cultural masterpiece”, was built in 1779 as a centre for merchants and buyers to trade pieces of cloth. It is the largest remaining cloth hall in England
Mr Hunt, who compares its layout to that of St Mark’s Square in Venice, said: “From its inception, the Piece Hall was a stunning combination of commerce and culture, an icon of hard business but also a testament to the history, lives and values of its surrounding community.” The hall, which reopened last summer after a £19m restoration, is the only building in Yorkshire to make the list. Its other Northern entrants include the Rochdale Pioneers’ Shop, where the co-operative movement was founded, and the Castlefield canal basin in Manchester. The list also takes in the former Morris Garage in Oxford, where the prototype for the Oxford Bullnose car was produced, and the old furnace at Ironbridge Gorge in Shropshire, at which Abraham Darby pioneered the mass production of iron. A more recent example is the 1986 Lloyd’s Building in London, designed with its pipes and staircases on the outside.
ITS ACQUISITION from Bradford of 400,000 priceless historic photographs, some from the dawn of the medium, had been denounced as an “appalling act of cultural vandalism”.
So the Victoria and Albert Museum, in London’s Knightsbridge, was choosing its words carefully yesterday as it unveiled the exhibition space it has developed for them.
Photographs held at the National Media Museum in West Yorkshire had been transferred to the V&A to create “the world’s foremost single collection on the art of photography”.
Critics, including the Bradford-born artist David Hockney, had said the museum was stripping the city of one of its “cultural treasures”, and Simon Cooke, leader of the council’s Conservative group, complained that the museum cared “not one jot” for its heritage and history”.
Tristram Hunt, the former Labour MP who is now director of the V&A, said the museum’s new Photography Centre, which opens in October, would “explore and explain the medium in a compelling new way”.
The centre will house not only the Royal Photographic Society collection transplanted from Bradford, but also new acquisitions including a selection of photographs taken by the late Linda McCartney, donated to the museum by her husband, the former Beatle Sir Paul.
The images feature music stars and several “tender family” moments.
Martin Barnes, senior curator of photographs at the V&A, said the collection in London would be available to all, “since we are able to catalogue it, digitalise it, put it out on loan”.
He added: “I hope that means that the collection is visible all over the country and around the world. It’s about making it accessible.”
Mr Barnes suggested that exhibitions generated in London might “end up in Bradford” on tour, adding: “It’s about working collaboratively across the institutions from this point forward.”
The inaugural display will trace a history of photography from the 19th century, including pictures of the first attempt on Everest in 1921, a digital wall “to show the most cutting-edge photographic imagery” and a “dark tent” inspired by the travelling darkrooms of 19th century photographers.