Colne Town Hall is a municipal building in Albert Road,
Colne
Colne () is a market town and civil parish in the Borough of Pendle in Lancashire, England. Located northeast of Nelson, north-east of Burnley, east of Preston and west of Leeds.
The town should not be confused with the unrelated Colne Va ...
,
Lancashire
Lancashire ( , ; abbreviated Lancs) is the name of a Historic counties of England, historic county, Ceremonial County, ceremonial county, and non-metropolitan county in North West England. The boundaries of these three areas differ significa ...
, England. The town hall, which is the meeting place of Colne Town Council, is a grade II
listed building
In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern I ...
.
History
After significant population growth associated with the increasing number of
cotton mill
A cotton mill is a building that houses spinning (textiles), spinning or weaving machinery for the production of yarn or cloth from cotton, an important product during the Industrial Revolution in the development of the factory system.
Althou ...
s in the town, the area became an
urban district in 1894.
In this context, civic leaders decided the procure a dedicated town hall; the site selected was a vacant site at the corner of two rows of residential properties (Albert Road and New Market Street).
The new building, which was designed by
Alfred Waterhouse
Alfred Waterhouse (19 July 1830 – 22 August 1905) was an English architect, particularly associated with the Victorian Gothic Revival architecture, although he designed using other architectural styles as well. He is perhaps best known fo ...
in the
Gothic style
Gothic or Gothics may refer to:
People and languages
* Goths or Gothic people, the ethnonym of a group of East Germanic tribes
** Gothic language, an extinct East Germanic language spoken by the Goths
** Crimean Gothic, the Gothic language spoke ...
, was built with
ashlar
Ashlar () is finely dressed (cut, worked) stone, either an individual stone that has been worked until squared, or a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, generally rectangular cuboid, mentioned by Vitr ...
stone and was officially opened by the chairman of the council, Samuel Catlow, on 13 January 1894. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with five bays facing onto Albert Road; the central bay featured a doorway flanked by
colonette A colonnette is a small slender column, usually decorative, which supports a beam or lintel. Colonettes have also been used to refer to a feature of furnishings such as a dressing table and case clock, and even studied by archeologists in Roman ...
s supporting a stone arch on the ground floor; there was an
oriel window
An oriel window is a form of bay window which protrudes from the main wall of a building but does not reach to the ground. Supported by corbels, brackets, or similar cantilevers, an oriel window is most commonly found projecting from an upper ...
on the first floor and a four-stage
clock tower
Clock towers are a specific type of structure which house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another build ...
with
pyramid
A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrila ...
-shaped roof above.
[ Internally, the principal rooms were the council chamber and the mayor's parlour.]Rawtenstall
Rawtenstall () is a town in the borough of Rossendale, Lancashire, England. The town lies 15 miles/24 km north of Manchester, 22 miles/35 km east of Preston and 45 miles/70 km south east of the county town of Lancaster. The town is at the cent ...
and which measured by and weighed , was laid outside the front door of the building during its construction. Investigations conducted by a research team funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund
The National Lottery Heritage Fund, formerly the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF), distributes a share of National Lottery funding, supporting a wide range of heritage projects across the United Kingdom.
History
The fund's predecessor bodies were ...
indicated that this paving stone is only exceeded in surface area by the large paving stones in front of St George's Hall in Liverpool
Liverpool is a City status in the United Kingdom, city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the List of English districts by population, 10th largest English district by population and its E ...
. After the area achieved municipal borough
Municipal boroughs were a type of local government district which existed in England and Wales between 1835 and 1974, in Northern Ireland from 1840 to 1973 and in the Republic of Ireland from 1840 to 2002. Broadly similar structures existed in ...
status on 14 September 1895, the building became the headquarters of the new borough and Councillor Samuel Catlow became its first mayor.[
The building continued to serve as the headquarters of the borough council for much of the 20th century but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged Pendle Borough Council was formed in 1974. It became the meeting place of Colne Town Council when it was formed in 2008.
The town council also took over responsibility for the management of the building in October 2017 and, following a programme of refurbishment works on the ground floor to create "the Waterhouse Bar" as a space for drinks receptions,][
]
See also
* Listed buildings in Colne
References
{{Borough of Pendle buildings
Government buildings completed in 1894
City and town halls in Lancashire
Colne
Grade II listed buildings in Lancashire