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| A detail of the National Westminster Bank on Crown Street |
After having a good look at Halifax Town Hall and photographing several listed buildings on Crossley Street, I returned to Crown Street to continue my British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge, but first stopped to photograph a couple of buildings that caught my eye – the first being No. 2 Silver Street, a mid/later C19 building that Historic England (HE) describe as being in the C13 Gothic style.
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| No. 2 Silver Street |
On the opposite rounded corner of Crown Street and Waterhouse Street, is the earlier C20 National Westminster Bank building, which is built in a Classical style with a rusticated ground floor, a door surround with floriated decoration and a dome rising above.
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| The National Westminster Bank building |
Like the Art Deco Virgin Money bank and the former Burton Buildings, the use of Portland stone makes it very conspicuous in a town where coarse grained gritstone from the Rough Rock and finer grained sandstone from the Elland Flags were quarried in many places around Halifax and were readily available.
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| Nos. 45 and 47 Crown Street |
Further along Crown Street, Nos. 45 and 47 form another pair of mid/later C19 Gothic buildings with modern shop fronts, which are Grade II listed for their group value. As with No. 2 Silver Street, it looks like it has been built with sandstone from the Elland Flags, but I just took a few record photos for my Photo Challenge and continued to Cow Green.
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| The upper storeys of Nos. 45 and 47 Crown Street |
To the west of this section of the main A629 road, which here is a dual carriageway, many of the buildings marked on the 1907 Ordnance Survey (OS) map have been demolished and replaced by mixed use C20 buildings and, compared to the centre of Halifax with its fine later Victorian buildings, the area appears to be quite run down.
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| A side by side view of the 1907 OS map and Google Map view |
Continuing south along Cow Green, I stopped briefly to photograph the corbel brackets in the form of bull's heads and hoofs that support the 3-bay oriel window on the splay of No. 5 Cow Green - an Art Deco building built at some time between the publication of the 1930 OS map and its revision in 1938, which was eventually published in 1947 after WWII.
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| The corbel brackets supporting the oriel window at No.5 Bull Green |
Zooming into a photograph of one of the scrolled brackets, there is a coat of arms with three castles, the word probity and a date of 1738. A Google search would suggest that this relates to the Halifax Freemasons' Lodge of Probity, which was founded in 1738 and perhaps that No. 5 was occupied at one time by the lodge.
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| A corbel bracket on No. 5 Cow Green |
On the north side of Cow Green is Bull Green, which was once the site of the cattle market and I assume that the carved corbel brackets described above relate to this. Construction works were being undertaken at the time of my visit and I just took a photo from a distance of another Art Deco building, Bull Green House (1932), before continuing to Harrison Road.
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| Bull Green House |
