Sir Ernest Corridor, who has died aged 94, led a outstanding renaissance in a struggling northern city, remodeling the world’s largest carpet manufacturing facility right into a beacon of artwork and enterprise working collectively, with hanging advantages to each. He step by step transformed half a mile of derelict Victorian buildings in central Halifax into what he referred to as a sensible utopia, the place makers of polythene baggage rubbed shoulders with employees from the Henry Moore Basis.
Dean Clough Mills was huge sufficient, however the “Corridor impact” rippled out to different as soon as wonderful behemoths together with Salts Mill in Saltaire close to Bradford, the place his former enterprise associate, Jonathan Silver, labored comparable magic. Every instance confirmed the combo of economic nous and inventive sensitivity that marked Corridor’s personal persona; he performed as a live performance pianist whereas pulling off profitable textile and property offers.
His begin in life may hardly have been much less promising. He was born in central Bolton to 2 cotton mill staff, Mary (nee Mann) and Ernest Corridor, initially of the Nineteen Thirties recession that introduced his dad and mom bouts of unemployment and faltering makes an attempt to make a go of a bakery. His defining second got here on the age of eight when a customer introduced a gramophone to his faculty, St George’s Toddler and Junior, and performed Sibelius’s Valse Triste whereas telling the music’s spellbinding story of ghostly company at a grand ball.
9 years later, Corridor was accepted by the Royal Manchester School of Music (RMCM), the place he studied alongside the longer term chief of the Hallé Orchestra Martin Milner and, considerably, the excellent younger pianist and composer John Ogdon. Corridor’s later recommendation to his 5 kids – by no means to check themselves to apparently extra profitable contemporaries – owed one thing to his discouragement on the time. Unable to match Ogdon, he deserted hope of changing into an expert musician.
He left the faculty in 1951 for nationwide service after which workplace work throughout the Pennines the place he took with sudden verve to life in Mountain Mills at Queensbury above Bradford, makers of high-quality worsted woollen suiting, a product with necessary hyperlinks to the worldwide world of vogue. When his rise throughout the agency culminated in his main a administration buyout in 1961, youth was besieging the clothes market and Corridor liked it. He had a lifelong assortment of natty Savile Row fits and in his 80s shopped at Pollyanna in Barnsley for manufacturers reminiscent of Comme des Garçons.
The mill’s success introduced him his first fortune, which was adopted by a bigger one from property improvement, particularly after he recruited Tony Clegg and shaped Mountleigh. Their canny offers included shopping for 800 homes at a cut price worth in 1981 on a redundant a part of the US Air Pressure base at Lakenheath in Suffolk. Two years later Corridor left Mountleigh and invested £20m in Dean Clough, the place the enterprise world anticipated a traditional demolish-and-redevelop to observe.
As a substitute, in a gradual course of lasting greater than 30 years, the “sensible utopia” took root, and nonetheless prospers underneath the path of Corridor’s eldest son, Jeremy, with greater than 150 tenant corporations using 4,000 individuals. Its success gave a fillip to the fashionable restoration of the close by 18th-century clothiers’ Piece Corridor market in Halifax and helped to deliver Vivien Duffield and her nationwide kids’s museum, Eureka!, to the city.
Corridor was aware of the huge philanthropy of his rich predecessors, the Crossley household who constructed Dean Clough, and the best way that the Mackintoshes (toffee makers of High quality Road and Rolo) had inspired their Halifax staff to be creative and recommend enhancements. His alternative of e book on Desert Island Discs was the entire works of William Blake, who coined the idea of a brand new Jerusalem rising amid the mills.
He was knighted for providers to the humanities in 1983 and received the Albert Medal of the Royal Society of Arts the next yr, serving as chair of Yorkshire Arts and Northern Ballet, and on the Arts Council. He was awarded 12 honorary doctorates and from 1996 to 2004 was chancellor of the College of Huddersfield, the house of superfine worsted material. However his energies and trademark enthusiasm now turned again to music and his unrealised plan to make it his principal work.
He recorded all Béla Bartók’s works on the age of 65, and all Frédéric Chopin’s piano items 5 years later, and performed Ferruccio Busoni’s Piano Concerto with the Sheffield Symphony Orchestra in 2003. He composed two piano sonatas and inspired inventive and musical pursuits in his kids, who have been despatched to high school at Dartington in Devon.
Corridor met his spouse, June Annable, on the RMCM they usually married in 1951 and had two sons, Jeremy and Tom, and two daughters, Virginia and Vivian. After the couple divorced, he married Sarah Welby in 1975 they usually had a son, Leopold. On full retirement from Dean Clough in 2007, Corridor moved to Lanzarote and constructed a small live performance corridor subsequent to his house, earlier than returning to the UK in 2021.
He’s survived by Sarah and his kids, and 14 grandchildren.
