West Vale Mill offices, Calderdale

Application to clear the remaining buildings on a former mill site:

https://portal.calderdale.gov.uk/online-applications/applicationDetails.do?activeTab=summary&keyVal=QKZB2SDWFG600

West Vale Mill, the demolition of which has been piecemeal throughout the last decade, was a stunning stone-built campus around which this village developed. The mill building, was lost a few years ago and was covered on this website. Now the last remaining vestige is to be removed.

Strangely, the mill offices pictured above are a perfectly domestic scale and aesthetic. Put some front doors on there and you’ve got a row of cottages. People still like cottages right? I imagine the developer, and possibly the planning team at Calderdale will have made a stink over the lack of adequate off-street parking, condemning this terrace to demolition.

The same can be said for the entire complex shown in the image below. I cannot think of a more perfect industrial Yorkshire townscape than the former West Vale Mill, now all gone. The market has proven time and time again that stone built industrial refurbishments outperform new builds on the market every time. People want character. These buildings did not have to be lost.

Not to mention the amount of embedded carbon that would be saved. Flattening a site and rebuilding it is hardly sustainable. No amount of locally grown broccoli from Todmorden is going to offset that.