Stephen Battye

Loyalty to Dewsbury and Batley was an essential part of his life, but of the three, his legacy is best seen in Batley where he established the Skopos Mills retail park, followed by the Red Brick Mill shopping village with its five cafes and top names in furniture, accessories, art, cookware and gifts.

Stephen Battye, who has died aged 60, failed the 11-plus, but this was a boy with an exceptional awareness of his surroundings and exceptional sensitivity to colour and shape, and leaving Horbury County Secondary Modern, he got a place studying textile design at Batley Art College.

There his lecturer, Barry Howgate, became his mentor, guide and helper. In a 1995 interview, he recalled: "He took me under his wing and changed me. I had a small Methodist education, and he exposed me to different influences and people. The back end of the 60s, the scales were falling off and anything was possible – there was an explosion in new design."

Earning holiday money painting walls in Providence Mills in Dewsbury, Stephen – never one to see anything go to waste – collected the scraps of woollen material that lay around, and attempting something never done before, took them back to college to try printing on them.

He eventually perfected the technique, and given space in the Providence Mills to set up a print room, he went into small-scale production.

When the proprietor, Walter Greenwood, won a major contract with the Japanese, he lost interest in Stephen's little operation, and left to his own devices, in 1971 he and two former Batley Art College students began producing large-scale geometric designs like nothing seen before, but not on woolly rugs; these were for curtains and coverings. True to his entrepreneurial instincts, Stephen Battye was moving on.

Becoming profitable after a shaky start, they formed Skopos, a limited company operating from a rented floor in the Cheapside Mills, Batley. They got the name with the help of a Leeds City librarian after they'd asked what the Greek for "design" is.

Their product range grew, they began employing a few other people, made their own fabrics, and Skopos continued doubling its turnover every year, and in 1980 – having won a contract for a new hospital in Qatar – bought Providence Mills where Stephen's career had begun.

It kept its lease on the part of Cheapside Mills it had been using, and turned that into a mill shop, selling off-cuts. Stephen Battye's policy of never throwing waste materials away – his grandfather owned a shoddy mill, and recycling was in Stephen's genes – meant it was never short of stock.

Skopos became the largest mill shop in the country, with a turnover, by the mid-1990s, of 18m. In 1993 the company bought the remainder of the 100,000 sq ft Cheapside Mill complex and turned it into a retail park which gave Batley a new lease of life.

In 1999, it was sold to a London-based company for 6m, and Stephen bought and converted the Red Brick Mill, the transformation he wrought there being the achievement of which he was proudest.

The pleasure he took in good design had no boundaries, and car design was one area where it found expression.

He was passionate about beautiful cars, owning a number of classic marques, and a particular treat for him was to take part in the London to Brighton Veteran Car Rally every November.

An insight into Stephen Battye's personality is provided by his politics. He stood three times as Conservative candidate for his local Labour-controlled council, but told an interviewer that if the council had been a Conservative one, he would have stood for Labour because he objected to political monopolies. Each time he stood, he increased his vote, and a simple calculation showed that he would eventually be elected. So he stopped standing.

"People take politics far too seriously," he explained.

In some respects a maverick, Stephen knew what he wanted, and knew that what he was doing was right and that people should trust him to do it properly. His vision for Batley and Dewsbury often brought him into conflict with others but he felt that living in the area gave him a right to seek to influence its future and was usually impatient and frustrated by the realities of how the process worked; in his view, everything always took far too long.

His inability to compromise could make him difficult, but his generosity and kindnesses showed the many who experienced them that there was a softer side to the perfectionist Stephen Battye.

He died after a period of ill health following repeated infections after a knee operation. He is survived by his wife Sara and their three children, William, Rosie and Joseph.