ABSTRACT
A woollen and worsted textile centre and an engineering town, inter-war Halifax was part of the Yorkshire woollen textile belt.1 The town is located seven miles from Bradford and over fourteen from Leeds on the central Pennine plateau on the banks of the Hebble Brook, a minor tributary of the river Calder. Halifax’s remoteness had hindered economic development until the early Victorian era. Halifax’s name probably derived from the old English Halli’s division of land and amounted to little more than a clearing in Saxon times.2 Not mentioned in Domesday, settlement first occurred with the foundation of a church in the early part of the twelfth century. Poor arable land in the environs of the new settlement saw the development of sheep husbandry. The geological good fortune of fast-flowing streams provided the soft water for the dyeing and finishing of woollen cloth, while the mills for water-powered fulling were developed from the existing corn mills.3 From such activity, John Hargreaves suggests that late medieval Halifax existed on a distinctive ‘dual economy’ of textiles and farming.4
