Atkinson Holt

Bridge House - home to the University’s Estates and Facilities -  is to have a new name that reflects its place at the heart of Huddersfield’s expansion as the Industrial Revolution gathered pace in the late 1700s with a project that effectively connected the town to the ocean and the wider world.

The two-storey, Grade II listed building, at Aspley Place, was constructed as a canalside warehouse in the later 1770s, and will now be known as Atkinson Holt, a name that commemorates two men – Joseph Atkinson and Luke Holt.

In the early 1770s, on behalf of Sir John Ramsden, who owned most of Huddersfield, they carried out a survey for a waterway that would connect the town to the Calder and Hebble Navigation at Cooper Bridge.  It would enable manufactured goods and raw materials to travel by barge between Huddersfield and Wakefield, Leeds and the East Coast port of Hull.

Before the coming of the railways this would be a major artery for Huddersfield’s burgeoning textile trade and was described as “the principal means of raising the town to be one of the principal marts for woollen goods in the West Riding”.

Known as Sir John Ramsden’s Canal or Huddersfield Broad Canal, the waterway is almost four miles long. Its construction was enabled by an Act passed on 9 March, 1774, after the scheme had been presented to a Parliamentary committee by Joseph Atkinson, who had been a lessee of the Aire and Calder Navigation and a surveyor and engineer for the Don Navigation.

When he argued the case for Sir John Ramsden’s Canal, Atkinson cited not only the advantages to Huddersfield’s textile trade but also the capacity of the waterway to carry lime, coal, corn and general merchandise much more cheaply than by road.

The canal took six years to complete, at a cost of just under £12,000. Luke Holt, of Middlestown -  a master carpenter turned engineer and mill designer – was highly active in waterway projects throughout the region and was closely involved in the construction of Sir John Ramsden’s Canal. He based himself at the Golden Fleece in Huddersfield for the recruitment of “person or persons willing to undertake all or any part of the masonry and digging work”.

The canal has nine locks and some distinctive structures, including the Turnbridge Locomotive Lift Bridge and the 1778 warehouse at Aspley now known as Sir John Ramsden Court and home to the University’s International Office. One of the oldest surviving canal warehouses in Britain, it too is a Grade II listed building.

Huddersfield Broad Canal ceased to be used by commercial traffic in October 1953 but was never abandoned. Today the basin at Aspley, opposite the University, is filled with pleasure craft and floating homes.

It was at Aspley that the Broad Canal met the Huddersfield Narrow Canal, a much more ambitious undertaking that linked Yorkshire and Lancashire via the Standedge Tunnel. It opened in 1811, after 17 years under construction and was completely closed in 1952, to be reopened in 1981 after a long period of campaigning and restoration by Huddersfield Canal Society. This is the waterway that passes through the heart of the University’s campus.

Bridge House becomes Atkinson Holt as part of the University’s policy of renaming key structures after significant local personages who have relevance to the purpose of the building. As surveyors and engineers, Joseph Atkinson and Luke Holt had a set of skills that mesh with those of the Estates and Facilities department. The adjacent Huddersfield Broad Canal is their legacy.