Column: Looking back with Alan Burnett

Situated next to, and almost as big as, Beacon Hill, it doesn’t even have a proper name.

Yet, nameless as it is, it still provides views over the town that are the equal of any, along with many a terrace and close of cheerful new housing.

The area in question is New Bank, Range Bank, Claremount and Horley Green, and it is at this part of Halifax that my photographs come from.

In the early nineteenth century, Turnpike roads were being built across the country with a speed that would shame many a modern planner, and the old route north out of Halifax, Old Bank, had broken the spirit of all too many packhorses over the years.

Anne Lister sold the road developers some land, Godley Cutting was “cut”, and New Bank became the new way to enter the town from the north and east.

The new road was opened in 1837, and over the next 150 years, streets and communities lined its route and spread up the hillside.

A new Godley Bridge was opened in 1900, an iron and stone triumphal arch through which visitors could view Halifax in all its smokey glory.

Pubs lined the main road and its side streets, the names of which read like a Betjeman poem:

Brickmakers, Pine Apple and then the Wellington;

Sour Milk Hall, Trumpet, Horse and the Beacon.

The 1960s brought a raft of changes to the hillside. The last remaining back-to-back houses were demolished and many a fine street was lost to the new Burdock Way.

St Thomas’ Church, lost its spire, Horley Green lost most of its houses, and cobbled streets gave way to tarmac closes.

I took most of these photographs during that period of transition, when the old hillside was still trying to come to terms with its new identity.