If you know Dean Clough, stop reading here and look at the pictures instead If not, consider Hall's achievement. In 12 years he has transformed the mills back into the powerhouse of the local economy.Dean Clough is the headquarters of the Halifax Building Society (rather comforting, that), and a regional headquarters for Sun Alliance, the Customs and Excise VAT people, and a plethora of small businesses, each housed in the cavernous, stone-laid floors of the old mills. Superb architecture, luxes of daylight, windows that open, views across the elevated urban freeway to hills that it would have been hard to prise DH Lawrence away from And cheap rent, too.And this is just the start. By persuading local and regional business to take space - lots of it - at slightly lower than average rents, Hall has brought in enough money to be able to afford to give away space - again, lots of it - to a gang of creative enterprises that could not have thrived here without such generous support.At Dean Clough, commerce and culture work together, book-in-filing-cabinet, as happily as anywhere I have ever seen. If this was the end to the tale of the carpets-to-computer wealth generation, it would be a perfectly good one with no need for elaboration But, this, as they say, is just the beginning.

Overlain - or is underlain? - on the old carpet mills is a handsome art gallery (opened late last year), an embryonic collection of 20th-century British furniture, a design awareness campaign for British schools (Design Dimension), a museum of contemporary science and technology for children, a gym and a restaurant that (sorry) could have come straight from central London (or Paris or New York), designed by Clare Brooks of Wolff Olins.All this, and more, has been funded privately, either by Dean Clough Industries Ltd (proprietor, Sir Ernest Hall) or by patrons, like Vivien Duffield, who have been captivated by what they have seen here and by Hall's magnanimous dream. Hall has the knack of opening doors for people at the right time. Open great timber doors here and you will encounter designers and artists of all persuasions busy at work.Mercifully, Dean Clough is not a precious place, which makes it even more remarkable. Because it has a workaday commercial bustle and edge, and because most of the creative people working here have, like Hall, made it on their own, Dean Clough is as far removed from the hothouse of the capital's creative world as one can get Or, at least, as far as one can get at heart.

For, in terms of quality of space, opportunity and food (the restaurant and bar are very good; the chef is David Watson who has earned a Michelin star before coming here), Dean Clough is more than up to scratch, by any standards - international or Yorkshire's own.This is has not been unrecognised. This week, and until 2 July, the Royal Society of Arts hosts an exhibition of the results of its student awards competition in the new Dean Clough Galleries. This is a big step for the RSA, as the awards and competition, the most important of their kind for British and European design students, have long been a London event. This year, a record number of students (2,975) entered the awards, of whom 87 received awards ranging from travel grants to work placements with companies sponsoring the event. This year's judges included Jean Muir, Betty Jackson, Kenneth Grange, William Brown (chief design engineer to the Humber Bridge), Patrick Head (of the Williams-McLaren Formula One racing team) and David Mellor (the cutler, not the one in the Chelsea "bedroom" strip).The designs, appropriate perhaps for their Yorkshire setting, are, no matter how inspired, remarkably down to earth. Here you will find little of the "hot", hip-hop, baseball-cap-on-backwards, chewing-gum inspired design that London and fashion magazines gorge on, but such kindly and desirable things as a swimming costume, by Sophie Goswell, for the over- 50s, that (I cannot, sadly, speak from experience) is a piece of cake to get in and out of, and flatters the most matronly figure. Swimming costumes aside, you will also find intelligent displays of graphics, footwear, furniture, cars and - appropriately for the setting - textiles.The only trouble at this mill is that there can never, on a day trip, be enough time to seeeverything it has to offer.