Piece Hall, in the West Yorkshire town of Halifax, is among the great relics of the glory days of England’s industrial north, one of the few surviving cloth halls, where international business was carried out in the heart of textile-trade country from the late 18th century.
Recently it’s had a transformation into a tourist attraction stuffed with independent shops that also hosts major outdoor concerts – this summer will see it play host to gigs by Madness, Rag’n’Bone Man, Hozier and Orbital.
So it’s a shame, then, that aliens have blown it up.
Piece Hall doubles for Moscow in the next Marvel TV extravaganza Secret Invasion. The teaser trailer released last week shows the huge courtyard of Piece Hall bedecked in Russian regalia and exploding dramatically, with Samuel L Jackson’s super secret agent, Nick Fury, on the case.
“When we came back to the shop after filming, there was soot all over the windows from the explosions they’d been doing!” says Georgie Evans, who runs the Book Corner shop in Piece Hall. Thankfully, the Grade I listed building is still in one piece. And Secret Invasion is just one of the latest of a growing number of TV and film productions using Halifax and its surrounding Calderdale area for filming.
Another one hits TV screens on 31 May – a BBC2 adaptation of the Ben Myers novel The Gallows Pole, which tells the true story of the Cragg Vale Coiners, who almost brought down the Bank of England through a gold coin-forging operation they launched in the 18th century as a novel way to cope with widespread poverty and deprivation: just make more money to spend.
The Shane Meadows series, starring Michael Socha as gang leader David Hartley, is filmed on location around Hebden Bridge, where the actual story fictionalised by Myers in his 2019 novel played out.
Hebden Bridge will be familiar to even the most resolute southerner as the setting for Happy Valley, which ended its three-season run in February, with 7.5 million tuning in to see the fates of Sgt Catherine Cawood (Sarah Lancashire) and her criminal nemesis, James Norton’s Tommy Lee Royce.
Indeed, there can be no greater champion for Calderdale’s celluloid success than perhaps its most famous contemporary daughter, screenwriter Sally Wainwright, who was brought up in Sowerby Bridge (pronounced “Sorby”, should you ever find yourself in Happy Valley country).
Her pen has also produced Last Tango in Halifax, again starring Sarah Lancashire, and Gentleman Jack, which featured Suranne Jones as the fourth wall-breaking Anne Lister, the landowner, diarist and lesbian who lived at Halifax’s Shibden Hall, which was extensively used for filming.
For Secret Invasion, Evans and her fellow shopkeepers were temporarily evacuated from Piece Hall so the Marvel Cinematic Universe could “destroy” it. She says: “Every time a new film or TV show is filmed in Calderdale, there’s fresh excitement. It’s great that Halifax’s richness is being put to use for everything from Gentleman Jack, the most local of stories, to something as otherworldly as Secret Invasion.
She says the town and surrounding area are getting more and more tourists, many of them telling her and fellow shopkeepers that they have seen Calderdale in one show or another. She adds: “Right now, we’re beyond excited about the release of The Gallows Pole. We’ve been behind Ben’s novels since they were first published by Hebden Bridge publisher Bluemoose, and Gallows has been our bestselling book every year since the bookshop opened.”
The area has become so popular as a filming location that the local authority, Calderdale council, has set up its own filming office. Councillor Sarah Courtney is the council’s cabinet member for towns, tourism and the voluntary sector, and says the borough has been reaping multiple benefits from the rise in filming. “There’s been a huge boost in tourism, and not just from the UK – international tourism as well, especially after Gentleman Jack,” she says. “Visitor numbers to Shibden Hall trebled after that.”
She adds: “But it’s also allowed us to develop skills and jobs in Calderdale, and to massively bolster our creative industries. People who wanted jobs in film and television would once have had to go to London, or beyond. Now they can stay here.”
Courtney credits Calderdale’s success to a “perfect positive storm”. “We have modern towns and tiny villages with cobbled streets, we have moorland and wooded dells, and all in a relatively small area and easy to access.”
Overseeing the success of not just Calderdale but the wider region is Screen Yorkshire, which was set up 21 years ago to market Yorkshire and the Humber as a location for TV and film – both for its own natural beauty and cosmopolitan areas and also to double up for locations around the world. Chris Hordley works with production companies to ensure they get the best locations and utilise the local crew and infrastructure that has grown over two decades as Yorkshire became a go-to place for filming.
“One of the big draws for productions is the sheer diversity here,” he says. “We have such a wide range of landscapes as well as towns and cities, and they’re all really accessible.
“Over 20 years, we’ve built up a tried-and-tested track record for providing the perfect locations and having the skills and talent right here in the county, which brings in companies from across the world to film here.”
Hordley deals with local authorities to coordinate filming, and recalls talking to Calderdale councillors ahead of the first series of Happy Valley to allay their fears about what light the gritty crime drama might present the area in.
It’s a question Courtney has been asked as well. She says: “When the finale was aired, I appeared on BBC Breakfast and I was asked if I was worried that the series was a bit bleak.
“Sally Wainwright is an amazing ambassador for the area and it was always her intention to portray the place she grew up in. That means light and shade. As I said during that interview, you might say bleak, but I say dramatic.”
On Location: other UK areas that appear on our screens
West Midlands: Birmingham is home to 1920s Midlands gangster epic Peaky Blinders (though a surprising amount was shot in Yorkshire), with the Black Country Museum being a key location. Wolverhampton was the location for the adaptation of Caitlin Moran’s How To Build A Girl, and also doubled for 1960s London for the Steve McQueen TV drama Small Axe. Birmingham itself passed for America in Steven Spielberg’s futuristic thriller Ready Player One.
Cornwall: England’s rugged south-west coast has provided many a backdrop for TV and film, notably two adaptations of Winston Graham’s Poldark novels (the later version with Aidan Turner scything with his shirt off). But there’s more; the BBC’s adaptation of much-loved children’s books Malory Towers was shot in the county, and Cornwall resident Dawn French starred in The Trouble With Maggie Cole for ITV. Holywell Bay near Newquay was the setting for Netflix’s Cursed, which drew upon Cornwall’s Arthurian links. On the big screen, the 2019 adaptation of David Copperfield was shot around Charlestown Bay.
Northern Ireland: Lisa McGee’s Derry Girls is the ambassador for the region’s film and TV offering, but it by no means stops there. ITV’s new adaptation of Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones was filmed entirely in and around Belfast, as was gritty TV drama series Blue Lights. Forthcoming action comedy movie Old Guy, starring Lucy Liu and Christoph Waltz, recently wrapped filming in Belfast. And, of course, Northern ireland was one of many Game of Thrones filming locations.
