Kingsway Arcade, Dewsbury - also Queensway

The glass roof over Dewsbury’s Kingsway and its near neighbour Queensway is quite the eye-catcher, drawing the gaze upwards and skywards. There are high, arched stone entrances bearing the names of these covered streets, which were not originally arcades, as the glass ceiling only came some 25 years after the buildings went up.

Dewsbury town centre is a quiet place these days, even the old market just over the road from these arcades being half empty on a Friday afternoon. However, there are big hopes for Dewsbury’s future, with the local council investing large sums in the town centre, and the Victorian arcade currently under wraps as it gets a complete facelift ahead of a big re-opening to come in 2025.

Kingsway has a handful of businesses (late autumn 2024), covering beauty, hair, toys and a burger cafe (which by the way has retained some nice old windows). There is ghost signage for an old upholsterers, which adds to the character of the place.

But the glass ceiling is enough to warrant inclusion in this Arcades Project (and in Margaret MacKeith’s 1980s books). With its iron work patterns and glass raised up high above street level, it is a feature well worth preserving, and deserves better footfall than it seemed to be getting at the time of my visit.

Queensway, a few yards up the road, is even shorter than Kingsway, and seems to have just three ongoing tenants: a large ‘casino’ which seems to house mostly slot machines in an amusement ‘arcade’, a barber’s and a kitchen goods store.

The glass roof and the stone entrance is, again, what makes Queensway worth including, though again footfall was minimal, and they can only hope for better days to come once the town centre has been redeveloped, along with Dewsbury’s Victorian arcade.

My pick of the arcade’s past

The glass roof was put over Kingsway to create this arcade in the mid-1920s. According to Margaret MacKeith in her 1983 compendium of arcades, the shopkeepers at the time were opposed to the roof going up, though it is not clear why.

A few years after the glass roof went up, the Kingsway Cafe claimed to have the largest room in Dewsbury for private events, and offered a 4-course lunch menu for 2 shillings (10p).

Hudsons’s furniture shop opened in the 1920s and were still going strong several decades later. Among their more famous staff members in his younger days before he became Star Treks’ Captain was Patrick Stewart (now Sir, of course, and more recently seen in adverts for Yorkshire Tea).

In the late 1960s chemist George Heugham got himself in the newspapers for a pill to help people pass their driving test. He claimed 200 people had bought his combination of sedative and tonic and subsequently sailed through the test. A course of tablets cost 2s 6d (12.5p) and he claimed demand was ‘snow-balling’. Having said that, the story did come out in early April 1969, so if his press release went out on 1 April… (www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk – Daily Examiner Huddersfield, 9 April 1969 – Reach plc)