A quick tour of Leyburn's old police station

 

Back in October, when I was up in Hawes for the Meet the Author event, I had an amazing opportunity to visit the old police station in Leyburn (about 16-ish miles from Hawes). Closed in 2021, it has now been bought by a property developer who is in the process of turning it into flats. Luckily for me, the new owner is also a fan of Grimm, so when he offered to give me a tour, I jumped at the chance!

As you can see from the photos, it’s an imposing Victorian building (they certainly built things to last back then). Inside, as you’d expect from a building that’s been empty for two years, it’s a bit run down, but you can still see all the features of the old station – the front desk, various admin offices, an empty computer cabinet, the parade room, a sound-proofed room, which left us all a bit baffled, and a handy height measurer to record the height of suspects. Best – and creepiest – of all, was the one remaining cell, with the observation hatch in the door. I wouldn’t have wanted to spend a night there either in the 1800s or the 21st Century. It’s a wonderful old building that really fired up my imagination – I mean what’s not to love about finding a body in an abandoned police station…? I felt very lucky to catch a glimpse of it before the renovation work starts.

According to this fascinating article in the Darlington and Stockton Times, the station was completed in 1878 and manned by ‘a team of rather strict-looking constables, all sporting fine moustaches’ (I can’t really imagine Harry with a big handlebar moustache, but who knows), ‘overseen by the God-like figure of the Superintendent’.

The station’s cells would make for a much shorter journey for the present-day Hawes team, who have to drive over to Harrogate if they want to hold a suspect overnight. But it seems that despite being even more sparsely populated than it is today, there was still plenty of crime to keep officers busy back in the day. These included fights, attempted shootings, ‘hawking
without a license’, poaching, drunkenness, sheep worrying and even murder. And here’s me thinking I was exaggerating crime rates in the Dales to ‘hawk’ my own books. It seems like Harry and the team would have been just as busy during Victorian times as they are today!

If you want to get a proper look at the inside of the station as it is today, then watch the video I made below. It’s just a whistlestop tour, but with renovation work due to start in the very near future, it might be the last glimpse of this piece of Dales history.