A Housing (and Civic) History of Huddersfield: Part I to 1918, ‘as advanced a town as any in the kingdom’

Huddersfield deserves to be better regarded. It’s a grand Victorian mill town, outstanding for the array of fine civic and commercial buildings of locally quarried sandstone that dignify its centre. (1) It was also an early and prominent pioneer of municipal enterprise and the second town in the country to build council housing. We’ll recount some of that civic history with a principal focus on housing in the blogs that follow. Here, we follow the story from its origins to the end of the First World War. View of Huddersfield from Longley Hall (the Ramsden family home), a print of oil painting by William Cowen, 1850 © West Yorkshire Archives Historically, Huddersfield was one of a number of small settlements in the Pennine foothills of Yorkshire’s West Riding in a local economy based on artisanal weaving, agriculture and small-scale mining. A prominent local family, the Ramsdens, bought the local manor from Elizabeth I in 1599 and John Ramsden was awarded a market charter for…