St. Peter's Buildings, Huddersfield
Visited with fishbrain.
Visited with fishbrain.
I've been wanting to get this one done for some time, not for it's interiors - which are hideously stripped and in an extremely poor condition - but more for the vantage point up high above the Victorian town centre of my adopted hometown of Huddersfield. So after getting a friend to check access was still on (cheers to 4Q for that), and a quick catch up with Fishbrain who'd spent that last 2 weeks gallivanting around like a hippy in the Nevada desert at the Burning Man festival, we gave it a little look.
History
The towering St Peter’s building was opened in February 1965 by the late Princess Margaret as the new headquarters of the YMCA in Huddersfield. It is located at the heart of Huddersfield, on the inside edge of one the town’s most important Victoria-era conservation areas and adjacent to a cluster of media/cultural industries.
The building was later sold to Huddersfield Polytechnic and used both as student housing and as teaching space. When the university came into being the building became home to the drama and media studies students, before they were moved on to the main Queensgate campus around 2006.
In 2006 Yorkshire Forward – the regional development agency who bought the buildings in 2004 for £1,758,200 – got involved and tried to secure a partnership deal with a private developer to take on the site. They hoped to create a complex of shops, restaurants and bars on the ground floor, fronting onto Lord Street and St Peter’s Street, with offices and apartments above.
Manchester-based developers Artisan had applied to knock down the buildings in 2007. But these proposals were shelved late 2009. Artisan intended on building a nine-storey mixed use development of 68 flats and 40,000 sq ft of commercial space.
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Huddersfield Town's Galpharm Stadium, in the shadows of the Kilner Bank.
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"A stately home built for trains"
The imposing station frontage was described by John Betjeman as the most splendid in England and by Sir Nikolaus Pevsner as 'one of the best early railway stations in England'.
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Thanks for viewing,
tweek
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