Lost Colne Bridge

Courtesy Kirklees Image Archive

The photograph above shows Colne Bridge in Kirkheaton around 1910 yet none of the buildings in this photograph survive today. There has been some redevelopment in the village but today there are no buildings on the right-hand side of the road. In effect about one-third of the village has disappeared.

Ordnance Survey map 1892

Not quite large enough to have had its own village school in 1910, Colne Bridge did have two shops, one of which was run by Sarah Shaw, two Methodist chapels and a pub the Spinners Arms.[1] One of the shops acted as a receiving office for the Huddersfield Sanitary Steam Laundry Company. Here the villagers could drop off their laundry to be cleaned.

Bradley railway station and the tram terminus outside The White Cross inn were not too far away should the villagers need to go into Huddersfield. In those days many of the people living in Colne Bridge worked at one of the three mills in the village. One of them, Harry Mellor’s, which made fine worsted cloth, provided employment until its closure in the 1970s.

Colne Bridge has been an important river crossing for at least a thousand years if not much longer. What we call the B6118 today is an ancient highway once taken by travellers coming up from the south and heading towards Lancashire, the Lake District and the Dales. There would probably have been a ford before the Cistercian monks from Fountain’s Abbey opened a grange in Bradley in the 12^th century and built a wooden bridge. Not just helping travellers, the new bridge stimulated local industry. Pottery making at Upper Heaton in the 13^th century [2] was amongst the first with coal mining, iron forging and textiles developing later. Over time the wooden bridge had been rebuilt at least twice due to flood damage. The current stone bridge is grade II listed dating from 1752 and was widened in 1801. Growing up around this bridge, Colne Bridge probably remained quite a small settlement until the time of the Industrial Revolution. An iron forge on the Bradley side of the river predates the industrial revolution then later with the building of three textile mills on the riverbank, the Ramsden Canal (1776) and the railway (1847) the village steadily grew.

Whilst Colne Bridge owed its beginnings to the river running through it, it would also play a part in why so much of the village has been lost. Sandwiched between Dalton Bank Lane and the banks of the Colne was a large tenement block known locally as “The Landings”. These damp and dreary back-to-backs housed fifteen families. Each house consisted of just two rooms – a living room/kitchen downstairs and a bedroom upstairs. Access to the four-storey building for residents was via two landings. With no hot running water, inside toilets, bathroom or electricity they would have been classed as slums.

Courtesy Huddersfield Examiner 17 April 2013

Those people living on the bottom landing had the worst of it. After heavy rain or when the snow melted in winter the Colne would flood the lower floor forcing the residents up into their bedrooms. At the time the river was far dirtier than it is today. As well as effluent from local industry going into the river there was also the discharge from a large sewage works less than a mile upstream. Residents complained of the awful smell, especially in the summer. The flooding also saw rodents getting into their homes. The worst flood to affect the Landings came after 20 hours of heavy rain on 19^th and 20^th September 1946, when the river burst its banks. A photograph from the time shows adult residents on the bottom landing taking refuge in their bedrooms whilst the children watch the floodwaters from the safety of the balcony on the landing above.

By the 1950s the Landings were seen as unfit for human habitation, but it would not be until the slum clearance programmes of the late 1960s that the building was demolished. At the same time Colne Bridge’s two shops, a disused Methodist chapel and two rows of terraced houses were also bulldozed. The only reminders of where these buildings used to be today are a stone gate post, some flagstones and a short stretch of wall.

JLL .Nov 2025

Footnotes