The Architecture the Railways Built – Huddersfield station

This Grade I Grecian-style gem – with one of the most stunning façades on Britain’s railway – was designed by the architect James Pigott Pritchett and built by Joseph Kaye.

The station – built between 1846 and 1850, according to Historic England – is widely considered one of Pritchett’s best neoclassical works, which also include the buildings at York Cemetery.

Membership organisation York Civic Trust says of Hudderfield station on its website: “The long neo-classical façade, reminiscent of a Palladian country house, with a portico of Corinthian columns, six wide and two deep, dominates St George’s Square, creating an impressive civic space planned as the centrepiece of the Victorian ‘new town’. [Poet] John Betjeman described the station as ‘as one of the most splendid in England’.”

Grandeur

The station owes its grandeur to the joint funding of the Huddersfield and Manchester Railway and Canal Company and the Manchester and Leeds Railway, according to Historic England.

See Huddersfield station in this trailer for episode nine:

Improvements to your journeys

We’ve worked hard in recent years to give you a better station at Huddersfield – one that’s fitting of such an impressive building.

In 2019, we and train operators TransPennine Express and Northern Trains completed a vital upgrade to extend platform two. This would allow new, longer trains with more seats to call there.

Meanwhile, we carried out platform extensions at seven stations along the Penistone line in Northern England to allow longer trains to run on the route.