Aspley Lime Kilns, Aspley

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This page is a bare-bones entry for a specific location marked on an old map. More detailed information may eventually be added...

Details

  • appears on maps: 1851 [#450]
  • location: access via unnamed road (later Firth Street) off Shore Street (now Wakefield Road), Aspley
  • status: no longer exists
  • category: works

Shown on the 1851 map as 12 lime kilns which were demolished prior to building of Albany Mills on the same site circa 1868 (now the site of the University of Huddersfield Business School). and the path which now leads past the University's Health Centre was once known as "Lime Kiln Road".

There are several contemporary newspaper reports that the homeless would shelter next to the kilns for warmth.

On 12 January 1855, labourer David North was found drunk and "sleeping close to the mouth of the Aspley lime-kilns [...] his clothes were too hot to be handled." At the court hearing he was fined 12 shillings after it emerged he had been warned before when he had slept there and his coat had caught fire.[1] Sadly, North continued with his habits of drinking and sleeping near the lime kilns and it ended in tragedy on the night of 14 April 1856. After a evening of drinking heavily at the Acorn Inn and the Navigation Inn, a witness saw him standing "with his back towards the kiln" at around midnight. North then "fell full length" backwards into the fire, perhaps having passed out drunk. Jabez Normington, a nearby boatman, ran and dragged him out but North died two weeks later at Huddersfield Infirmary from his burns.[2]

In February 1861, James Green was charged with vagrancy after being found sleeping at the lime kilns. The magistrates were told he was a "well-known vagrant" and he was given the choice of spending a month in prison or "quitting the town within an hour".[3]

In March 1866, two boatmen and a tramp named John Martin were found asleep "within half a yard of the fire in the lime pits" — although the boatmen were discharged, Martin was sent to prison for seven days.[4]

Location

Notes and References

  1. "Huddersfield Police Court" in Huddersfield Chronicle (20/Jan/1855).
  2. "A Man Burned to Death by Sleeping on a Lime Kiln" in Huddersfield Chronicle (03/May/1856) and "Death from Burning" in Huddersfield and Holmfirth Examiner (10/May/1856).
  3. "Vagrancy" in Huddersfield Chronicle (09/Feb/1861).
  4. "Magistrates in Petty Sessions: A Dangerous Bed" in Huddersfield Chronicle (24/Mar/1866).