ANYONE passing by may have looked twice when a wooden cab shelter, hoisted by a crane out of Bradford’s Exchange Station, was taken off on the back of a lorry.
The little shelter had been at the station for nearly 100 years when, in 1973, it was gifted to the National Tramway Museum.
Now the restoration of the rare surviving Victorian horse cabmen’s shelter has been completed at the museum, in Crich, Derbyshire, thanks to funding from an Arts Council England National Lottery Project Grant, The Pilgrim Trust and the Association for Industrial Archaeology.
Cabmen’s shelters were built in Britain from the early 1870s - the Exchange Station shelter was the first in Bradford - to provide drivers of hackney carriages and hansom cabs with somewhere warm and dry to wait while they waited for passenger fares.
There was also space for horses in the shelters, which could be warmed during the winter months. The RSPCA supported the Bradford shelters as part of its mission to improve the welfare of working horses. The charity gave the cab drivers a supply of water for the horses and somewhere to dry horse rugs.
The Bradford shelter, now at Crich Tramway Village, was installed in the city in 1877. Originally used by horse-led cabmen, it was later used by the Bradford Taxi Association.
The shelter was designed gratis by local architects TH & F Healey and built by Messrs. Johnson and Smith. It cost £194 paid for with funds raised by the ‘Ladies’ Committee’.
The Building News of 1878 reported: “The structure is of pitch-pine, stained and varnished, the roof laid with felt upon the boarding, then covered with sheet zinc. The stove, which is very compact, contains oven, hot-plate, and boiler for supplying warm water for the horses - an arrangement much appreciated by the cabmen.”
The architects’ drawings show the interior fitted with lockers under bench seating, a table with coal locker, and a toilet and wash basin.
The shelter was initially outside Christ Church on Darley Street, then in 1879 it was relocated to the Exchange Railway station, where it stood until moving to the Tramway Museum in 1973. On January 22, 1973 the Telegraph & Argus reported that the little building had been given to the museum by members of the Bradford Stations Taxi Association, to save it from likely demolition. Taxi drivers no longer needed to use the shelter because of the closure of the old Exchange Station.
The T&A reported that four members of the Tramway Museum Society came to Bradford to collect the office, loading it onto a lorry and taking to its new home in Derbyshire.
The shelter is regarded as a rare survivor of the Victorian era. The Tramway Museum says that although there are cabmen’s shelters in London, only one other similar to the Bradford one is known of.
Over the years the shelter had deteriorated and become structurally unsafe. In 2020 work commenced to restore it to how it looked when first in use. Original architects’ drawings have been used to fit out the interior to recreate its 19th century appearance, with features including bench seating, a table, coal locker, hand basin and stove.
Most of the exterior of the shelter was still original, apart from the clerestory roof which was covered with tiles in the 1970s.
A new roof has been designed and built as close as possible to the original architects’ drawings, using a similar shelter at Embsay Station as guidance. The design allows ventilation through fixed louvres on either side of the clerestory, with two hatches on the roof beneath which can be opened and closed using a pulley system.
According to the museum, no records of the original colour of the shelter have been found, except the reference in The Building News of 1878 which reported that it was ‘stained and varnished’. The restoration team found it had been painted various shades of blue during its time outside Exchange Station, as this was the colour used on other parts of the station.
The original colour is thought to have been created from a mix of white lead paint and iron oxide. The paint was stripped back to bare timer then painted in a colour considered to be the most accurate representation of the base layer of tan paint, was GWR Light Stone.
With 3D scans of the shelter used to create virtual tours, visitors can experience the shelter as it looked to Victorian Bradford - complete with sounds and smells of a busy cabmen’s facility.
* To take a virtual tour of the cabmen’s shelter go to tramway.co.uk
A display about the project will be at Bradford Local Studies library until mid June then at the City Library.
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