HUNDREDS of people who worked at a Hoddlesden factory between the wars are to be commemorated in a sculpture on the village's Millennium Green.

The Green was created on the site of the former Places Pipeworks which closed in the 1950s. The Millennium Green committee already has plans to mark the site of two former chimneys used by the company with two original pallets from the factory.

Now the 350 people who worked at the factory at its busiest time, in 1932, will be remembered in a sculpture featuring 350 individual faces each measuring six inches by eight.

Children and adults from the village will be invited to create a clay face during workshops in January and it is hoped the finished product will be in place by March.

Public art graduate Jane Lim, who has been designing an information leaflet to advertise the Green, has come up with the sculpture idea as part of her Masters Degree.

She said: "The more I got involved with the leaflet the more interesting the site became. It is certainly more than a nature reserve because so much has happened there.

"It has a Saxon road across the bottom of it and is obviously near the Roman Road. There was a coal mine on site and when the coal became exhausted the owners found clay which is when they started manufacturing pipe."

"People will be given photographs of the former workers to give them ideas for their faces."

The Green opened in 2000 with help from the Countryside Agency and Lottery money.