Developers will be allowed to bulldoze a 130-year-old former railway shed despite heritage experts’ fears it is the last remaining building of its type.

Timber merchants CR Taylor have been given permission to build a 73-home development at its headquarters in Station Road, where Denholme’s former railway station once stood.

That will mean developers demolishing a run-down former railway goods shed which is of “historical significance” as one of the last remaining buildings of its kind in the country.

At a meeting of Bradford Council’s Shipley Area Planning Panel last Thursday, Alan Whitaker, who has researched railways in West Yorkshire for 40 years, called for it to be sensitively restored as part of the mixed housing and business development.

He was supported by national railway history experts, the West Yorkshire Archaeological Advisory Service, Denholme Town Council and the Great Northern Railway Trail Forum (GNRTF), a group which has been campaigning to re-open the former Great Northern Railway route between Queensbury and Cullingworth for walkers and cyclists.

Mr Whitaker told the panel: “All these groups and individuals are telling you that there is a significant historic building on this site, which should be protected and embraced in any new development. I find it utterly bizarre that the council is looking to demolish this building.”

The plans approved on Thursday include the new homes and two small industrial units on the land, once existing buildings are knocked down.

Mr Whitaker said the planning officers’ decision to get rid of the shed was based on “one page of paper” from the architects behind the re-development of the site, a claim denied by CR Taylor’s agent, Rachel Flounders.

She said: “This has been considered in a lot of detail and it has been demonstrated that there is no viable use for the building.”

This week, CR Taylor said it welcomed the planning panel’s decision and that it was central to a relocation programme designed to meet the company’s future expansion needs.

Executive chairman Charles Taylor said: “We have long outgrown our present premises. The planning committee recognised that for the business to expand we need to move.”