Rochdale Town Hall
|Rochdale Town Hall|
The Town Hall, in 2008
|Former names||Rochdale Town Hall and Police G.V. I Station|
|Architectural style||Victorian, Gothic Rev
Rochdale Town Hall
|Rochdale Town Hall|
The Town Hall, in 2008
|Former names||Rochdale Town Hall and Police G.V. I Station|
|Architectural style||Victorian, Gothic Revival|
|Current tenants||Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council|
|Construction started||31 March 1866|
|Inaugurated||27 September 1871|
|Destroyed||10 April 1883 (tower)|
|Owner||Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council|
|Height||190 feet (58 m)|
|Floor area||3,000 square yards (2,500 m2)|
|Design and construction|
|Architect||William Henry Crossland,
Alfred Waterhouse (clock tower only)
|Other designers||Rochdale Corporation|
|Main contractor||W. A. Peters and Son|
|Awards and prizes||Grade I listed building|
Rochdale Town Hall is a Victorian-era municipal building in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. It is "widely recognised as being one of the finest municipal buildings in the country", and is rated by English Heritage as a Grade I listed building. The Town Hall functions as the ceremonial headquarters of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council and houses local government departments, including the borough's civil registration office.
Built in the Gothic Revival style at a cost of £160,000 (£12.6 million as of 2014), it was inaugurated for the governance of the Municipal Borough of Rochdale on 27 September 1871. The architect, William Henry Crossland, was the winner of a competition held in 1864 to design a new Town Hall. It had a 240-foot (73 m) clock tower topped by a wooden spire with a gilded statue of Saint George and the Dragon, both of which were destroyed by fire on 10 April 1883, leaving the building without a spire for four years. A new 190-foot (58 m) stone clock tower and spire in the style of Manchester Town Hall was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, and erected in 1888.
Art critic Nikolaus Pevsner described the building as possessing a "rare picturesque beauty". Its stained glass windows are credited as "the finest modern examples of their kind". The building came to the attention of Adolf Hitler, who was said to have admired it so much that he wished to ship the building, brick-by-brick, to Nazi Germany had the United Kingdom been defeated in the Second World War.
Rochdale had developed into an increasingly large, populous, and prosperous urban mill town since the Industrial Revolution. Its newly built rail and canal network, and numerous factories, resulted in the town being "remarkable for many wealthy merchants". In January 1856 the electorate of the Rochdale constituency petitioned the Privy Council for the grant of a charter of incorporation under the Municipal Corporations Act 1835, to constitute the town as a municipal borough. This would give it limited political autonomy via an elected town council, comprising a mayor, aldermen, and councillors, to oversee local affairs. The petition was successful and the charter was granted in September 1856. The newly formed Rochdale Corporation—the local authority for the Municipal Borough of Rochdale—suggested plans to build a town hall in which to conduct its business in May 1858. The site of an aba