Canalside West is a recently converted Grade II listed textile mill, which has been purposely bought and renovated (at a cost of over £5M) to house the then School of Computing and Mathematics. The mill was built in 1865, by Thomas Firth (the street on which it stands is named after him), and began its life manufacturing wool yarn, but in its time has manufactured cotton and carpet yarns. Because of the diversity of its textile industry Huddersfield has managed to weather the storms of industrial unrest and change and at one time manufactured silk and the finest woollen worsted in the world.
Firth Street Mill, as it was then known, was ideally placed with the
canal providing excellent transport to Halifax, Wakefield, Leeds, York
and Hull in the one direction and Manchester and Liverpool in the other.
In 1886 Reuben Hirst purchased the mill and added the weaving sheds (these now house two of our largest classrooms, a large 275 seater lecture theatre and the 24hr access laboratory). However this venture into weaving was not successful and in the 1920s the business returned to spinning. The 1930s saw another change of hands, to Fred Lawton & Sons, who bought the mill to expand their business. The Lawtons manufactured woollen carpets, blankets and weaving yarns (and indeed still do to this day) and are at present in the top three of the UK woollen carpet yarn spinners. In 1989 Fred Lawton & Sons once again needed to expand and moved to larger premises in the village of Meltham, leaving the mill empty until its purchase by the University in 1994.
Built of local stone on the outside, the inside was built to a fireproof construction with vaulted brick roofs and cast iron pillars on all floors. The conversion was sympathetically carried out to retain a lot of the mill's design features, including the cast iron pillars and the vaulted roofs. The casing for the beam engines which powered the machinery on each floor is still embedded in the west staircase. The octagonal chimney standing by the original gate to the mill has also been retained; although its use now is merely decorative, its original purpose in life was to take away unwanted fumes and to create a draught to fire the furnaces for the steam engine.
Page by Ros Hawkins.