Halifax Railway Station

Halifax Railway Station

This railway station on Horton Street was built in 1855 to designs by Thomas Butterworth of Manchester. It was constructed as a joint venture by the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway and the Leeds, Bradford and Halifax Railway, with George Thompson and Co., the noted railway contractors, undertaking the work. The building was substantially altered in the 1880s and again in the late twentieth century.

The station is executed in a Baroque interpretation of the Palladian style, constructed in finely jointed and crisply carved ashlar with slate roofs and substantial chimneystacks. The main frontage is 236 feet long, with a projecting central section three feet forward and end bays projecting six feet.

The building is single-storey overall, though the central frontispiece rises to two storeys. A very deep modillion eaves cornice runs across the façade, decorated with a frieze of scrolled consoles alternating with raised panels, and a continuous ground floor sill band. The three-bay frontispiece projects forward again at its centre bay, where a porte-cochere (reconstructed in the 1990s) marks the entrance. The entry features a round-arched opening containing three arches: the outer arch is panelled; the next is Tuscan with moulded voussoirs; the inner arch is also Tuscan but with shorter pilasters supporting a full entablature that forms a transom to the fanlight above. The two flanking sash windows are pilastered and pedimented with balustrades running between the panelled plinths of the pilasters.

The side wings each contain six bays with sash windows featuring moulded architraves and panelled aprons. The windows and doorways of the wings are supported by scrolled consoles carrying alternating triangular and segmental pediments. Doors have moulded stone architraves with overlights and segmental pediments. The projecting end bays contain tripartite pilastered sash windows with panelled aprons.

The first-floor frontispiece breaks forward at its centre, where it is flanked by paired rusticated pilasters that support a modillioned pediment in the tympanum. Within this pediment sits a carved coat of arms of Halifax. Central blind oculi with four keystones contain clock faces. Two heavily rusticated blind Diocletian windows with moulded keystones occupy the flanking bays.

In 1885–1886, William Hunt, regional architect to the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway, oversaw alterations that introduced the platform canopies and connecting footbridge. The platform on the east side features a cast-iron and timber canopy of this date, carried on a single row of columns (now glazed in), though this platform is no longer in use. The island platform (platforms 1 and 2) has a cast-iron and timber canopied awning of the same period, supported on two rows of columns with ornamental capitals and brackets to the cantilevers, which display pierced geometrical tracery in the spandrels and rows of rooflights. A similarly styled enclosed footbridge of 1885–1886 connects the island platform to a late-twentieth-century entrance structure, with stair access to the platforms; a lift shaft was added at the east end of the footbridge in the late twentieth century.

Hunt also created a siding platform in front of the building with a further canopy, which transformed the west elevation into a platform elevation. This front siding and canopy were removed in the late twentieth century, and the land now forms part of the landscaped grounds serving Eureka! The National Children's Museum.