No. 51 Station Road in Batley

 

A keystone

Arriving at Batley railway station on the train from Leeds at 10:37 am, having left Treeton just over two hours earlier, I set off across a large forecourt that is paved with large rectangular sandstone road setts and immediately sensed that I was surrounded by a former industrial area, which is now part of the Station Road Conservation Area. 

 

The station forecourt

When later looking at old Ordnance Survey (OS) maps, several mills and a gas works had been built in the vicinity of the station by the end of the C19, with extensive railway sidings, which coincided with the rapid growth of Batley and other nearby towns in the Heavy Woollen District during the second half of the C19 – based on the production of shoddy and mungo. 

 

The OS map showing the area around Batley railway station

 

Although not part of my British Listed Buildings Photo Challenge, the first building that I noticed was the elaborately decorated No. 51 Station Road (c.1880), which the Historic England (HE) description records as former office and warehouse premises. 

 

No. 51 Station Road

 

Getting closer to the 7-bay rounded façade, I was very interested to see that the keystones to the ground floor windows are exquisitely carved with a monkey and birds, which HE state as including an owl, eagle and a macaw. 

Carved keystones

HE describes the corner with Warehouse Street as having a turret on the 1st and 2nd floors, but could which also be considered to be an oriel window. The soffit of this is carved in relief with various animals and floral details, beneath which is a round headed window with an enlarged keystone carved in the form of a bat. 

 

The keystone with a bat and the soffit to the oriel window

 

Moving round to the entrance and porch, HE further highlights the elaborately carved capitals that are composed with foliage and sheep heads, which are a motif that I have frequently seen in the textile producing towns - especially in Dewsbury, where I also came across very many fine examples of figurative sculpture on the keystones. 

 

The porch

 

The capitals are set on columns of pink Peterhead granite, which was quarried on the Aberdeenshire coast and, together with Rubislaw granite, is very often seen in later Victorian banks and other public buildings all over the UK. 

 

A detail of a column and capital

 

Looking up at the gable, there are more examples of fine architectural sculpture, with the cornice decorated with stylised floral motifs and above this is a shield flanked by sitting figures and it is surmounted by a squatting dog. 

 

The gable

 

I didn’t look closely at the sandstone, but from my photos it is quite uniformly light brown in colour and appears to be fine grained, with both plane bedding and cross-bedding. Looking at the geological map, much of the area is underlain by the Thornhill Rock and the Building Stones Database for England map explorer shows that this was quarried at several places less than 3 km to the north-east.

 

Quarries on the Thornhill Rock