T. COLLINSON & SONS: THE HALIFAX FIRM THAT TASTED THE TEA AND SMELLED THE COFFEE
T. Collinson & Sons is one of those Halifax names that feels woven into the town’s everyday history — a firm known for tea and coffee, built up the hard way, and remembered through the places it traded and the people who worked behind the counter.
This page tells the story through the places people still recognise: Cornmarket, Fountain Street, and St John’s Place.
Collinsons Cafe at 13 Crown Street
The story begins in Halifax with Thomas Collinson. In the early days, the business was linked with stout and porter, but Thomas made a firm decision to step away from intoxicants. Instead, he chose to specialise in tea and coffee — trades that were once common and skilled in their own right, even if we don’t hear much about tea blending and coffee roasting today.
Thomas wasn’t just a shopkeeper. He travelled the villages of Calderdale in a dogcart, bargaining, building relationships, and turning a small operation into a recognised local name. He was remembered as a whiskered figure with friendly eyes — and with a few unusual habits too, including a phobia for banks and a knack for keeping money hidden around his premises, locations known to many of his staff.
Behind the business name was a Halifax family. Thomas and his wife Mary had at least ten children, all born in Halifax. In the 1840s the family lived in Fountain Street, rooting the story firmly in the town’s streets rather than just in company records.
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As the years moved on, the firm became a proper family concern. Younger sons Joseph and Edward became partners, and by 1881 the business was employing 13 men. The firm’s reach also grew: a first branch opened at Brighouse, followed by others in Bradford, Leeds, Huddersfield, Blackpool, Bolton and Buxton. After 1840 the business gradually expanded, and in 1896 it became a limited company under the name T. Collinson and Sons.
Halifax itself remained central to the story — especially St John’s Place. Collinson acquired warehousing there for tea blending, coffee roasting and fruit cleaning, with stabling provided as well. Later, in 1908, a new warehouse was built at St John’s Place — a building many local people still remembered for years afterwards. The site stood alongside the Freemasons’ Hall, and later became part of a much-changed streetscape.
Collinsons warehouse on St Johns Place credit to Steve Gee
Some of the best remembered images of the firm bring it back to the town centre. One caption places Thomas Collinson’s first shop in Cornmarket, Halifax, in 1886, under the sign of a large golden canister hanging over the door — the sort of detail you can picture instantly. Another shows Collinson’s cart travelling throughout the Halifax district, a reminder that this was a business built by movement, effort, and local trade.
Collinsons first cafe was 4th shop on the right with the large golden cannister which stood over the door.
The streets changed, as they always do. A later caption notes that a row of older buildings was pulled down in 1988 to make way for an office block, and that the facade of the Freemasons’ Hall was retained behind a curtain of glass. It’s a sharp contrast: the old Halifax of shopfronts, carts and warehouses, and the modern Halifax of redevelopment — with just fragments of the past still visible if you know where to look.
Collinsons warehouse and the Freemasons Hall to its right
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