Wildrose Arts

Recently added

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  David Fletcher (4)

  I’ve got four years and I’ve got a couple of those before I’m there and then there’ll be some teething problems I expect because it’s a kind of….it’s a new sort of thing and of course I work with the Alternative Technology Centre and their water power people have got this water power scheme, and Alternative Technological Centre are in another mill that we bought – I bought it with a friend jointly to save its life, you know, save it from demolition. Bought two on the canal bank and sold one of them to help to pay the other one.

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  David Fletcher (3)

  Bridge Mill is a terrific building. It’s the oldest building in Hebden Bridge by a long way. There is actually a written record of it having consent to impound the river. Sir John de Thornhill, Thornhill near Wakefield I imagine, was given consent by the Prior of Lewes, Sussex on behalf of the Lord of the Manor, to impound the river and construct a mill on the Wadsworth bank of the stream between the township of Wadsworth and the township of Heptonstall, and this is recorded in the city archives in Leeds and the date was 1314, you know, nearly two hundred years before the stone Hebden Bridge Bridge was built.

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  David Fletcher

  Well my father came to Mytholmroyd; he bought into a small corn merchant’s business in Mytholmroyd and so he was working very hard to try to get that established. 1933 was a critical year for him because one of his major customers went bankrupt and it almost took him with them, so it was a pretty tough time and they’d just moved into this new house, a semi-detached house on Caldene Avenue. Caldene Avenue at that time was just rubble, it wasn’t a tarmacked road.

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  David Fletcher (2)

  There wasn’t an estate agents in Hebden Bridge so we set up a volunteer estate agency and we gave all the information away for free. We just had a sheet of properties that were on the market with a guide price against it and the contact details of the people that owned it, and you know, when you look at it today with its estate agents – there just weren’t any at that time – and then the fourth part was the big problem buildings. What do you do with buildings like Birchcliffe Church and Sunday School, like Nutclough Mill? Like you know, these we saw as places where we might get new forms of employment in time and we – although we were trying to attract new people – didn’t want it to become a dormitory area and so that was the strategy.

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  Ralph Thornber

  Well that was a business that I started. I’ve Townson Thornber fuels….I don’t know how long ago we started it, it was about ’89 and then I sold it to Shell and I carried on working for fourteen years which….I thought it would last fourteen minutes, but, and then I decided I’d had enough and since then they’ve sold it to someone else, but it’s still about and it’s basically the same people as we had.