On 21 December 1945, the great English contralto Kathleen Ferrier walked onto the stage of Huddersfield Town Hall and sang. She was thirty-three years old, three years into the career that would make her one of the most loved voices in 20th-century music, and seven years from the cancer that would kill her at forty-one. She was singing in a hall built half a century earlier by a small Yorkshire town determined to take its civic culture seriously.
Huddersfield's Town Hall was a long time coming. The town's Improvement Commissioners had operated from rented offices in South Parade from 1848, then moved to the Philosophical Hall on Ramsden Street from 1859. By the 1860s, with the wool and woollen trades booming, the town had outgrown both. The new building was designed by John Henry Abbey in the Classical style, with the stone quarried at Crosland Moor and the architectural sculpture carved by Thomas Stocks of Berry Brow. It was completed in two stages. The northern part, containing the municipal offices, opened on 26 June 1878, officially inaugurated by Alderman Joseph Woodhead, the mayor. The southern part, which contained the great concert hall and was given large Corinthian columns at first floor level outside, followed in 1881. By 1889, Huddersfield had achieved county borough status, and the Town Hall became the meeting place of the new municipal authority.
Susan Sunderland was the daughter of a Brighouse mill worker who became, in the mid-19th century, one of the most celebrated sopranos in England. Born in 1819, she sang for Queen Victoria, was known as "the Yorkshire Queen of Song," and retired to Halifax. In April 1889, the first annual Mrs Sunderland Music Festival took place at Huddersfield Town Hall, with the retired soprano herself presenting the prizes to the winners. She was almost 70. The festival was a competitive event for young musicians from across the region, designed to encourage musical excellence among working-class performers. It has run, with adjustments to its calendar and format, ever since, eventually expanding to occupy up to nine days each spring. Few civic music festivals in Britain have survived from the 19th century into the 21st; Mrs Sunderland's has.
The concert hall earned a reputation for fine acoustics and a steady stream of distinguished performers. Kathleen Ferrier sang here on 21 December 1945. On 26 July 1949, Princess Elizabeth, the future Queen, visited the Town Hall with the Duke of Edinburgh and waved to the crowd from the balcony; she was 23, three years from her coronation, and had been married just under two years. The hall's organ has been restored multiple times, most recently in 1997, when the leading organist Gordon Stewart attended the reopening and performed Dance Suite for Organ, a piece specially commissioned for the occasion from the composer Noel Rawsthorne. Rawsthorne had been the organist of Liverpool Cathedral for 25 years. The composition is a still-played part of the British organ repertoire.
When the Local Government Act 1972 came into force in 1974, Huddersfield County Borough was abolished. The Town Hall became the headquarters of the new Kirklees Council, a much larger metropolitan authority covering Huddersfield, Dewsbury, Batley, and surrounding areas. It still serves that role. The building is Grade II listed and remains the principal civic and concert venue for the town. The northern entrance porch, flanked by its two columns with parapet above, continues to admit councillors, brides and grooms, and concertgoers in roughly equal numbers.
The Town Hall sits on Ramsden Street in the centre of Huddersfield, walking distance from the spectacular Huddersfield railway station with its colonnaded facade. The concert hall is open for performances; the council chamber and other civic rooms can sometimes be visited on heritage open days. The Mrs Sunderland Festival typically runs each spring. Choral and orchestral concerts continue throughout the year. The building's Classical exterior, modest by comparison with the great Italianate confections of Leeds or Bolton, was designed for a town that valued plain civic dignity over architectural pyrotechnics. A century and a half later, that judgement has worn well.
Huddersfield Town Hall sits at 53.64°N, 1.78°W in the centre of Huddersfield, West Yorkshire. Best viewed at 2,000-3,000 feet AGL; the Classical stone facade is most easily picked out by reference to the spectacular colonnaded Huddersfield railway station (Britain's second-finest after Newcastle, in the opinion of John Betjeman) directly across the town. Nearest airports: Leeds Bradford (EGNM) 12 nm northeast, Manchester (EGCC) 18 nm southwest, Doncaster Sheffield (EGCN) 28 nm east. The Pennines rise immediately to the west; the Holme Valley and the dramatic Saddleworth Moor are within easy view.