Becca Hall

Becca Hall is a country residence situated in Aberford, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England at OS grid reference Lat.53:50:35N Lon.1:22:08W. It is situated on Becca Lane within the old Gascoigne estate. The house is a Grade II listed building.

The house was built in 1783 for William Markham, the son of William Markham, Archbishop of York and the private secretary to Warren Hastings. It descended in the Markham family for several generations until it was sold in 1894 by Ronald Markham to Arthur Thomas Schreiber, who lived there until his death in 1902. His widow remained at the hall until her own death in 1907, when it was sold to a Bradford wool magnate Frederick James Lund, who lived there until 1922. It was then sold to Thomas Percy Fawcett, a maltster from Castleford, whose family owned the house until 1949, when it was bought by the Thompson family. In 1958 it was bought by the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB).

Following the privatisation of the UK electricity industry in 1989, ownership of the property passed to the National Grid Company. It was used to house the Leeds Grid Control Centre for the UK's electricity transmission network from 1958 until its operational closure in 1997. Advances in communications technology (including remote substation operation) during this period reduced the requirement for regional control centres. By the time of its operational closure in 1997, the entire electricity transmission network in England and Wales could be controlled from a single control room anywhere in the country. Later used as a control centre, it performed as one of the control centres for the Dinorwig hydroelectric storage facility in North Wales.

After being relinquished by the National Grid, the house passed through the hands of a series of would-be developers with various plans, all of which came to nothing. An application for planning permission to develop the building for use as a training centre was refused in September 2004, on the grounds that the development would be unsustainable and would affect local use of the area due to parking requirements. During this period it was however sometimes used for social functions.

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