The students of CAPA College join Wakefield Council in celebrating the successful completion of the HAZ project

The Upper Westgate Heritage Action Zone project (HAZ) began in 2020 and aimed to restore and preserve some of Westgate’s most historically important architecture.

Fast forward to today and the £4.4m scheme funded by the Council, Historic England and the owners of the buildings, has successfully secured the future of 19 historic buildings and 5 significant ginnels.

In the 1500’s Westgate was a busy, bustling high street, lined with wonderful hand crafted and precisely engineered timber-framed Tudor buildings. A great example of which can be found at 6-8 Silver Street.

However, regeneration isn’t a modern concept and Wakefield is a city that has been reinventing itself for centuries.

During the seventeen and eighteen hundreds, slowly but surely, the timber-framed buildings of the Tudor period were lost to modernisation, as newly constructed Georgian and Edwardian architecture began to appear along Westgate.

The wool trade was responsible for much of the city’s booming economy, and many of those made wealthy by it chose to build grand, private residences here. Westgate became home to some of Yorkshire’s wealthiest families, making Wakefield the place to be.    

By the mid to late 1800’s many of the smaller businesses that had been established in Wakefield for generations were unable to compete with huge factories and mills being constructed in other areas, such as Bradford, Halifax and Manchester. The expansion of the railways opened the market to other areas, and these combined factors caused the local economy to decline.

Many of the once grand private residences were deemed to costly to maintain and began to fall into disrepair.

Neglected, and in some cases abandoned, many of these buildings became unsafe and unusable, until eventually they were demolished and lost forever. However, there are still lots of wonderful glimpses into the city’s remarkable past and traces of grandeur still dot the street of Westgate, especially if you know where to look.

The HAZ project has given many of the historic buildings that remain a new lease of life and will allow future generations to look back on the history and heritage of their city in the same way that we are able to do today.

To celebrate the completion of this important project members of the Council joined various organisations, businesses and volunteers who made the HAZ project possible, and enjoyed a performance of ‘Bowhead Whale’, a funny, emotional and inspired production that portrays life in Wakefield during various decades. The students at CAPA college delivered great performances and proved once again that Wakefield is bursting with creativity and talent.