In Holmfirth restoration work has started on the former premises of Bamforth & Co in Station Road. For a number of years as we drive I’ve been thinking that I really ought to stop and take a photograph of the sign because I remember it from the early 1960s when, for a while, we used to drive this way on Sundays to visit my grandfather in a nursing home in Cheadle Hulme, Cheshire.
As we drove past today the sign had finally been removed so these are images from Google Maps street view. In my memory, the sign was a vertical one that you saw on the corner of the building as you approached down the hill:
BAMFORTH & CO. LTD., ILLUSTRATORS AND PUBLISHERS
Even aged nine I wanted to be an illustrator, so I assumed that this was the kind of office/factory in which an illustrator would work. I’d be intrigued to know more about the building’s history. Bamforth’s started in 1870 as a portrait photographers, so that could be a Victorian photographer’s studio running along the second story of the building.
Bamforth’s later specialised in producing magic lantern slides and later saucy seaside postcards. Between 1898 and 1915 they produced black and white silent films, so perhaps this was used as a studio.
Link: Bamforth & Co, Wikipedia
Records of Bamforth and Company are kept at the Tolson Memorial Museum in Huddersfield.