Designed by John Brunton Partnership of Bradford, it was completed in 1972 to serve as the headquarters of the Yorkshire Building Society but went unused for decades.

[1][2] High Point was one of a trifecta of headquarters of building societies built in the brutalist style at the time of its construction in Northern England.

[3] The Twentieth Century Society described the three buildings as representing in retrospect "the last-gasp of a sort of Heath-Wilsonian regional resurgence, at a time when "financial services" were not synonymous with the corporate casino-ism of the City of London, but a flourishing of century-old Victorian independent mutuals, and northern self-sufficiency".

[1] In his A Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, Owen Hatherley describes High Point as "utterly freakish, the severed head of some Japanese giant robot clad in a West Yorkshire stone aggregate".

[2] Jenkins felt that the Brutalist style of Highpoint was "F-you architecture" intended as a political statement by its architects as opposed to an aesthetic that they themselves would personally utilise.