Women of Substance

Don't Make Yourself Smaller: Jaxs Palmer's Yorkshire Story!

The Piece Hall Trustee, founder of Henrys Ark Management Consultants, Chartered Fellow of the CIPD, and one of the most articulate voices in Yorkshire, on women in leadership. She also, once, wanted to be a journalist. Shannon Palmer meets Jaxs Palmer.

Stand in the centre of The Piece Hall on a quiet Halifax morning and you can hear the past. Three arcaded levels — Arcade, Rustic and Colonnade — rise around a 66,000-square-foot courtyard, and behind each of the 315 doorways once stood a clothier with a piece of woollen cloth thirty yards long, sometimes a fortnight's work, waiting for a merchant's nod.

When this place opened its doors on New Year's Day 1779 — after a silver key, a brass band, and a firework display set off, improbably, by a pigeon — it was already the most ambitious commercial building in the north of England. It is now the only Georgian cloth hall of its scale left standing anywhere in the world. It is Yorkshire's cathedral of trade.

And it is here, beneath the same gritstone arches that watched West Riding clothiers haggle by candlelight, that Jaxs Palmer is helping rewrite the building's next chapter.

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