Leeds Town Hall
Leeds Town Hall is a 19th-century municipal building on The Headrow, Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. Planned to include law courts, a council chamber, offices, a public hall, and a suite of ceremonial rooms, it was built between 1853 and 1858 to a design by the architect Cuthbert Brodrick. With the building of the Civic Hall in 1933, some of these functions were relocated, and after the construction of the Leeds Combined Court Centre in 1993, the Town Hall now serves mainly as a concert, conference and wedding venue, its offices still used by some council departments. It was designated a Grade I listed building in 1951.
Imagined as a municipal palace to demonstrate the power and success of Victorian Leeds, and opened by Queen Victoria in a lavish ceremony in 1858, it is one of the largest town halls in the United Kingdom. With a height of it was the tallest building in Leeds for 108 years from 1858 until 1966, when it lost the title to the Park Plaza Hotel, which stands taller at. The distinctive baroque clock tower, which serves as a landmark and a symbol of Leeds, was not part of the initial design but was added by Brodrick in 1856 as the civic leaders sought to make an even grander statement.
The project to build the Town Hall came about as Leeds underwent rapid growth and industrialisation during the 19th century, helped by a desire to compete with Bradford and symbolise Leeds's dominance within the region. Proceedings began in July 1850, carried through by a dedicated committee of the Town Council, which held a competition selecting the relatively unknown Brodrick to prepare a design, with construction underway by July 1853. The building cost much more than the original estimates due to rising prices and constant additions to its design throughout construction.
The form of Leeds Town Hall has been used as a model for civic buildings across Britain and the British Empire, being one of the largest and earliest. As a key heritage asset for the city, its history as a court and prison is demonstrated in guided tours for the public. Several recurring cultural events use the Town Hall as a performance space, such as the Leeds International Piano Competition.
Description
The Town Hall is classical in style but suggestive of power and drama. It stands at the top of a flight of steps on a mound made specially for the purpose of increasing its prominent position. The south, principal facade to The Headrow has a deeply recessed portico of ten Corinthian columns, a frieze and then the high clock tower, which has a concave dome and was not in the original design.The three other sides of the building are similar to the south front, except that the columns and pilasters that surround them are near to the walls, and the spaces between them have two tiers of circular-headed windows. The principal entrance is a -high archway under the south portico, which contains three highly ornamented wrought iron doors. The smaller, day-to-day entrance is to the east, facing Calverley Street.
The Victoria Hall – originally the Great Hall – rises to inside the parallelogram of surrounding rooms and corridors and the enclosing colonnades. It is lined with marble-effect columns with gilt capitals and bases, with painted mottoes around the walls, including "Good Will towards Men", "Trial by Jury", and "Forward". The decoration was by John Crace, and, combined with the cut-glass chandeliers and the largest organ in Europe when opened, led one writer to say that it was "the best place in Britain to see what it looked like on the inside of a wedding cake". As the principal performance space, the richly decorated Victoria Hall is still a venue for orchestral concerts. The frescoes adorning the domed ceiling of the vestibule were the first attempt to embellish a provincial edifice with high art. In the centre of the vestibule stands an -high white marble statue of Queen Victoria, by Matthew Noble, presented to the Council upon the hall's opening as the gift of the mayor Sir Peter Fairbairn.
The Town Hall provided accommodation for municipal departments, a courtroom, police station, and a venue for concerts and civic events. It still has a role as a council office, though many departments have since relocated – most are now in Merrion House, opened 2018, and others, including a chamber for council meetings, are in the 1933 Civic Hall.
Sculpture
The building is constructed of Rawden Hill millstone grit. As architectural master sculptors the Mawer Group produced the majority of the decorative carving. This did not include the rusticated and vermiculated base, the "giant" columns and fluted pilasters, the parapet with vases, or the basic detailing to the tower and ventilation turrets, which were the work of masons including Thomas Whiteley, who was associated with Robert Mawer. In preparation for the sculptural work, the carving areas were roughed out on the building blocks by the masons before the blocks were hoisted into place. The architectural sculptors would ascend ladders and scaffolds to carve the fine art pieces in public view.The sculptor credited for the general carving work on the building is Catherine Mawer, whose stoneyards were in Oxford Place on the west side of the building, and George Street on the north side. Her nephew William Ingle, who ran the stoneyards, carved all the sheep head reliefs, which represent the fleece. He was also responsible for the team that produced the general architectural sculpture.
The tympanum above the south entrance is by the sculptor John Thomas. The figures represent Progress, Art and Commerce. The central figure is Athena, who has a laurel wreath, distaff, judicial chair, and owls taken from the Leeds coat of arms and from her own set of animal attributes. From left, the other four main figures are Industry with an anvil and a bale of cloth, Poetry and Music with a faun's head and a flower-swag, Fine Arts with a Corinthian capital and a bust of Minerva, and Science with a compass, globe and tools.
On the west and north elevations of the building, the fourteen keystone heads were being sculpted by Catherine Mawer's husband Robert, between 1853 and 1854, when he died. Catherine Mawer completed the masks, as well as the putti on the side panels of the main entrance and on the clock tower. The four Portland stone lions on plinths along the frontage, an 1867 addition by the sculptor William Day Keyworth Jr, contrast with the sandstone of the building itself, and were modelled at London Zoo. The first two lions were unveiled on 15 February 1867, the soft Portland stone has subsequently eroded with the weather.
History
Background
Until 1813, the seat of Leeds Corporation was the Moot Hall of 1618, on Briggate, which was also used for judicial purposes. Leeds went through a period of rapid growth in the first half of the 19th century and by the mid-19th century it became apparent that the court house was no longer large enough for the functions it performed; it was demolished in 1825 and replaced by a new court house on Park Row.The neighbouring town of Bradford, the "wool capital of the world", took the lead in trying to elevate industrial Yorkshire towns with stately, grand architecture by building St George's Hall in 1851–53. It was a new status symbol, and as there was perpetual competition between Leeds and Bradford, calls grew within Leeds for its own town hall. The physician and social reformer Dr John Deakin Heaton became a major advocate and campaigner for a town hall, having visited Europe and enviously remarked on the "famous old cities whose Town Halls are the permanent glory of the inhabitants and the standing wonder and delight of visitors from a distance". His, and other supporters', belief was that "if a noble municipal palace that might fairly view with some of the best Town Halls of the Continent were to be erected in the middle of their hitherto squalid and unbeautiful town, it would become a practical admonition to the populace of the value of beauty and art, and in course of time men would learn to live up to it".
In July 1850, Leeds Town Council held a public meeting, the decision of which was that a "large public hall" should be built. Emulating St George's Hall, the council proposed to sell shares in the building to the value of £10 but there was little public interest. In October, a councillor proposed introducing a specific rate levied to fund its construction instead of using a joint stock company. A decision was deferred until after the municipal election of November 1850 to give ratepayers a chance to express their views. The town hall was approved in January 1851 when the motion was put to the council and carried by twenty-four votes to twelve. The resolution read: "As the attempt to raise funds by public subscription has failed, it is the opinion of this Council desirable to erect a Town Hall, including suitable corporate buildings". The sum voted was £22,000 for the building and £9,500 for the land. It was intended to represent Leeds's emergence as an important industrial centre during the Industrial Revolution and symbolise civic pride and confidence.
A council committee was established to assess the opinions of Leeds's inhabitants. It sent delegations to other large towns including Manchester and Liverpool to investigate their plans for building public halls. In July 1851, it presented a report, with consultees including Joseph Paxton, the designer of The Crystal Palace. The report's recommendation identified a site for the hall on what was then Park Lane which contained Park House and its gardens. This site was on the edge of the town centre of the time, but the project required a large parcel of land that was unavailable in the congested central streets. It was purchased from a wealthy merchant named John Blayds for the sum of £9,500.
The scheme did not secure universal backing immediately; a council motion in February 1852 proposed it was "unwise and inexpedient to proceed with the Hall". This, and other motions to limit its costs, were defeated by small majorities, but they demonstrated that financial prudence was a strong compulsion for some Victorian local politicians, who disliked incurring civic expense without genuine proof of public advantage. These happened to be in a minority in Leeds, which in the same year backed other large projects such as installing sewers for the city. Support among the public and interest groups also helped – the Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society was in strong support of the hall, as was the recently formed Leeds Improvement Society. Heaton, its secretary, reminded dissatisfied ratepayers throughout the decade that the Town Hall was important if the city were to discard its image of being an architectural backwater with few buildings of merit.