Town Teams - Mytholmroyd - "Creating a new Market Town"

Mytholmroyd is a village rather than a market town. It sits at one of the widest sections of the Valley at a crossing point over the confluence of the Rivers Calder and Cragg Brook.

Background
Mytholmroyd grew up around a river crossing on the packhorse trail from Sowerby to Heptonstall. The village lacks any identifiable centre with a limited collection of shops along Burnley Road and New Road and a small supermarket in George Street.

However, the village is a spiritual and educational centre with Catholic, Methodist and Anglican churches. Mytholmroyd is also home to Calder High School, the largest secondary school in the Valley.

The village grew dramatically from the middle of the twentieth century, as the outward expansion of large suburban housing estates, on the much flatter valley sides, spread out from the centre. Mytholmroyd is also famous as the birthplace of the late Poet Laureate, Ted Hughes, and there are plans to build an international centre dedicated to poetry in the village.

The Community Centre Site
The Mytholmroyd Community Centre is in the heart of the village and sits at the back of a large and underutilised car park. The north-west corner of the site is owned by the Primary Health Care Trust and will soon be available for redevelopment.

The Community Centre Square
Both the Community Centre car park and the land owned by the Primary Health Care Trust should be redeveloped to create a public square surrounded by a mixed-use development, containing creative and small business start-up units, studios, workshops, live/work units and a mixture of housing types and tenures. At the same time, the existing Community Centre buildings would be either renovated or rebuilt to include an enhanced range of facilities for both the local and valley wide community.

St Michael's Church and Sunday School
St Michael's Church is hidden behind its own Sunday School building. The space in front of it is used as a car park. A thin row of shops on Burnley Road blocks the views of the church and the river. The public toilets, on the corner of the bridge, are the most prominent buildings in the town. St Michael's Square has the potential to become not only the new heart of Mytholmroyd but also, given its strategic location at the centre of the Valley, a symbol for the Renaissance of the Valley as a whole.

St Michael's Square
To optimise the opportunity to create a 21st Century Marketplace, a new building is proposed that would straddle the River Calder, containing new facilities for the Sunday School, a creative and small business 'hub' and a combination of other uses. It would provide a fitting location for the spiritual and operational home of the Flying Shuttle, complete with its audio-visual camera obscura. The public toilet site would be developed, framing a gateway to the bridge.

Walsden · Todmorden · Hebden Bridge · Mytholmroyd · Sowerby Bridge