War and piece: a new chapter

We're sitting outside a caf at the Piece Hall, an astonishing building to find in the centre of Halifax. Opened in 1779, it's Britain's last-surviving "cloth hall" – not actually a hall at all, but a sort of square coliseum, a huge courtyard surrounded by a warren of 315 rooms where handloom weavers once sold their "pieces", or lengths of woollen cloth.

It was one big showroom, a prototype shopping mall, but it was badly timed. Within 30 years of its main gate being ceremonially opened for business with a silver key, the Industrial Revolution had transformed weaving from a cottage industry to a factory industry. The handloom weavers dwindled and the Piece Hall's tiers of rooms became an obsolete monument to a lost age, a white elephant black with soot. No-one knew quite what to do with it – and that's been more or less the story ever since.

It spent the best part of a century as wholesale fruit, vegetable and fish market, with a shanty town of utilitarian stalls and sheds hiding its elegant Georgian architecture. It narrowly escaped being knocked down and replaced by a car park, and for the past three decades it has housed independent, specialist shops, somewhere between the arty, the antiquey and the alternative. Back in the early Eighties, it was a

busy place, a bustling day-out in its own right, but in recent years it has seemed underused and rather tired, a bit of a backwater.

Now, however, Calderdale Council, where Barry Sheridan is arts and education manager, has landed almost 240,000 from the Heritage Lottery Fund to work up a 7m grant application. If successful, it will kickstart a 16m regeneration plan backed by Yorkshire Forward.

Over the next four years, the aim is to upgrade the Piece Hall, a Grade 1 listed building, from a relic of pre-industrial history to "a vibrant focal point of town centre life" that will give it "a thriving future as a major regional and national visitor attraction".

Sheridan and Rob Mayo, project manager for the bid, talk of putting it on a par with Castle Howard or Harewood House as an essential Yorkshire building to visit. It will be reinvented as a public square and performance space bristling with bars, cafs, restaurants, high quality shops and "creative businesses and young entrepreneurs".

Mayo hands over a leaflet outlining "The Vision". It features a stunning artist's impression of how this reinvigorated sleeping giant will look at dusk, with its architecture newly showcased and celebrated. Its pillared galleries and colonnades glow romantically around a broad paved piazza with fountains, outdoor diners and an air of continental chic and glamour nicely geared to a world of post-industrial leisure. It looks more like Siena than Halifax, but, nearer home, it suggests other imaginatively restyled Northern survivors – Dean Clough down the road in Halifax, Salts Mill in Saltaire, Liverpool's Albert Dock.

There are dissenting voices about this plan – some current retailers feel sidelined – but the first thing is to try to convey the scale, atmosphere and uniqueness of a building big enough to accommodate 34,000 people for a Sunday School "Whit Sing" in 1856.

"This was the last of the cloth halls to be built and absolutely the biggest, the grandest and the most prestigious," says Sheridan. The others – in Leeds and Bradford, Huddersfield, Wakefield and elsewhere – were, he says, "interesting and quirky, but this was in a different league". He's right. It's an arena surely made for rallies, military tattoos and re-enactments of the Napoleonic Wars, and no-one describes it better than the architectural historian Gavin Stamp.

"The Piece Hall ought to be one of the sights of England, but it is comparatively unknown," he wrote 20 years ago. "Perhaps that is because Halifax is not so much visited, both owing to the blinkered prejudice of southerners and the fastidious tastes of aesthetes who care only for the aristocratic and the rural.

"But even in the fine, dignified town of Halifax it is possible to miss the Piece Hall, for its spacious glory is a well-kept secret. Coming upon it is like finding one of the great mosques of Delhi or Cairo; a vast sea of calm hidden in the midst of bustling, narrow streets."

Twenty years on, for "calm" read "becalmed". Around 30 businesses occupy perhaps 40 per cent of the available retail units and are dotted along the galleries among a lot of empty rooms. They are interesting and appealingly eclectic – silver, fashion, glass, comics, stamps, chocolate, books, music, models, crystals – but they rattle around this

vast space.

"Last year, 1.3 million people came here," says Rob Mayo. "But a lot of that was through-route pedestrian traffic, people just walking through. We think there are 35,000 'considered visits' a year. It's so disappointing with a Grade I listed building. There needs to be something here to hold people.

"We think the retailing needs to include niche retailers and manufacturers. It needs to be somewhere with sufficient variety and interest as a reason to come here. You have to be more selective about what retailers you allow in. And a key factor is the night-time economy, where we'll have bars and restaurants drawing people in."

The plans have alarmed some of the existing retailers. "We haven't been kept in the loop," says Simon Shaw, who sells comic books and graphics from his Legacy Comics shop. "We haven't been consulted about the plans and what we think of them. And we haven't been given any guarantees about our future. Some businesses are already looking for other premises because it's not concrete what's going to happen."

With a giant image of Pitt, an Incredible Hulk-style comic hero looming behind his counter, he says some potential customers are under the impression that the Piece Hall is empty, and he has set up a Friends of Piece Hall Retailers group on Facebook, with 500 people signing up.

"The councillors who come round avoid us as they pose for their happy, smiling pictures, grinning like Cheshire cats," he says. "One councillor said that the Piece Hall was like a glorified car boot sale. We complained about that. It's a case of the little man fighting against the big council. We want to be more involved.

"They're wanting to turn it into something that it's not. They're hoping for exclusive jewellery and lingerie shops, but they're not going to get a Leeds-Manchester clientele in Halifax. People who go to Harvey Nicks won't come here."

Across the courtyard, Gina B Clarke runs Gina B Glass, a "designer fused glass" shop – jewellery, mirrors, beads, tiles, plates, much of it made by herself: a cavern of brightly coloured glass. She has been at the Piece Hall for 30 years, but is worried about her future here.

"I don't know what's going to happen over the next few years," she says. "If it all goes ahead I don't know whether I'll be part of the plan. There's uncertainty about what will happen to all these small businesses during and after the work."

She remembers the Piece Hall's most thriving days. " When I first moved in, there were potters, silversmiths, basket weavers, wood turners. It was brimming over; it was brilliant. And I think it's absolutely brilliant that, after all these years, it's been recognised what a great building this is and that money is going to be spent on it.

"We don't want to be in the way of progress because I know it's got to happen for the benefit of the building. So I've got to be positive. But I want to know that I'm going to be part of it. We all want to be part of the future."

Barry Sheridan counters the retailers' charges. "I don't accept that there hasn't been consultation," he says. "We've given them reassurances that there will be dialogue. Some are naturally concerned about change, but the building is not sustainable in its current state. There is no conspiracy about clearing people out of the building. We want quality and interesting retailing and there are some interesting businesses already here and we're keen to keep them for the future."

Rob Mayo adds: "The place needs to be run on a commercial basis and that means that sometimes hard decisions have to be made for the good of the building as a whole. Just leaving it to drift aimlessly is not viable."

Whatever they might have thought of the new plan, the hard-headed crowds at the Piece Hall's opening back in 1779 would have applauded its confidence. They were, after all, full of confidence themselves. Before a procession of tradesmen and bands, they joined in a rousing chorus in praise of the Piece Hall's main inspiration:

"When Adam and his comfort Eve

Lived in a garden fair,

They dressed themselves in green fig leaves

For want of better wear.

But we, their sons, are wiser grown

Than leaves of figs to pull,

We clothe ourselves from head to foot

With ever-honoured wool."