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Description
Boothtown is situated on the A647 road from Halifax to Bradford. It was on this road that Percy Shaw came up with the idea of cat's eyes as an aid to road safety. Boothtown falls within Town Ward, one of the 17 wards of Calderdale.
Boothtown includes Akroydon, a Victorian model housing scheme which was designed in the Gothic style by George Gilbert Scott in 1859 for the workers at the mills of Edward Akroyd. Akroyd's former home in Boothtown, now the Grade II listed Bankfield Museum and library, also houses the Regimental museum of the Duke of Wellington's Regiment.[1]
The longest running Boys' Brigade Company in Calderdale is based at Boothtown.
Boothtown is the home of Saint John the Baptist Serbian Orthodox church. There has been a Serbian community in the area since the 1940s, when Serbian POWs and anti-Communist refugees from German camps arrived in Halifax in 1947. They needed a place to worship and were given a former Methodist chapel in Simpson Street to worship in. Closed in the 1950s, it was acquired by the Serbian Orthodox Church in 1952. The building, by then in a dilapidated state, was renovated and consecrated on 26 September 1954.