The Old Town Hall is a municipal building in the Market Square in

Midhurst Midhurst () is a market town and civil parish in the Chichester District in West Sussex, England. It lies on the River Rother (Western), River Rother, inland from the English Channel and north of Chichester. The name Midhurst was first reco ...

West Sussex West Sussex is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South East England. It is bordered by Surrey to the north, East Sussex to the east, the English Channel to the south, and Hampshire to the west. The largest settlement is Cr ...

, England. The building, which is managed by the Midhurst Town Trust, is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building is a structure of particular architectural or historic interest deserving of special protection. Such buildings are placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Hi ...

History

The member of parliament for

Guildford Guildford () is a town in west Surrey, England, around south-west of central London. As of the 2011 census, the town has a population of about 77,000 and is the seat of the wider Borough of Guildford, which had around inhabitants in . The nam ...

, Sir Anthony Brown, donated a site in the Market Square to the burgesses of Midhurst for the purposes of erecting a market hall in 1551. The building was designed in the

neoclassical style Neoclassicism, also spelled Neo-classicism, emerged as a Western cultural movement in the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassici ...

, built in buff brick with an

ashlar Ashlar () is a cut and dressed rock (geology), stone, worked using a chisel to achieve a specific form, typically rectangular in shape. The term can also refer to a structure built from such stones. Ashlar is the finest stone masonry unit, a ...

front and was completed later that year. It was arcaded on the ground floor, so that markets could be held, with an assembly room on the first floor. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage facing west towards Church Hill; there were three openings on the ground floor, which was rusticated, and there were two

sash window A sash window or hung sash window is made of one or more movable panels, or "sashes". The individual sashes are traditionally paned windows, but can now contain an individual sheet (or sheets, in the case of double glazing) of glass. History ...

s on the first floor. Full-height

Doric order The Doric order is one of the three orders of ancient Greek and later Roman architecture; the other two canonical orders were the Ionic and the Corinthian. The Doric is most easily recognized by the simple circular capitals at the top of t ...

pilaster In architecture, a pilaster is both a load-bearing section of thickened wall or column integrated into a wall, and a purely decorative element in classical architecture which gives the appearance of a supporting column and articulates an ext ...

s were installed at the corners and the roof was hipped and covered with

slate Slate is a fine-grained, foliated, homogeneous, metamorphic rock derived from an original shale-type sedimentary rock composed of clay or volcanic ash through low-grade, regional metamorphism. It is the finest-grained foliated metamorphic ro ...

. A

woven coverlet A woven coverlet or coverlid (derived from Catalan language, Cat. ''cobrellit'') is a type of bed covering with a weaving, woven design in colored wool yarn on a background of natural linen or cotton. Coverlets were woven in almost every community ...

maker, Gilbert Hannan, founded a grammar school for twelve poor boys in the assembly room in 1672, and the building was converted for municipal use as the local town hall in 1760. The assembly room was originally accessed using a stone staircase inside the building but, in the early 1840s, extensive restoration work was carried out at the expense of the local member of parliament,

John Abel Smith John Abel Smith (2 June 1802 – 7 January 1871) was a British Member of Parliament (MP) for Chichester and Midhurst. He was the son of John Smith who preceded him as one of the members of parliament for Midhurst. Smith married Anne Jervoise ...

. A new external staircase with

wrought iron Wrought iron is an iron alloy with a very low carbon content (less than 0.05%) in contrast to that of cast iron (2.1% to 4.5%), or 0.25 for low carbon "mild" steel. Wrought iron is manufactured by heating and melting high carbon cast iron in an ...

railings was installed on the north side of the building and a lock-up with two cells for petty criminals was established in the building. Following completion of the works,

magistrates' court A magistrates' court is a lower court where, in several Jurisdiction (area), jurisdictions, all criminal proceedings start. Also some civil matters may be dealt with here, such as family proceedings. Courts * Magistrates' court (England and Wales) ...

hearings, which had been held in the Angel Inn in North Street, were relocated to the assembly room in the town hall in April 1848. The village

stocks Stocks are feet and hand restraining devices that were used as a form of corporal punishment and public humiliation. The use of stocks is seen as early as Ancient Greece, where they are described as being in use in Solon's law code. The law de ...

, placed outside the front of the town hall, continued to be used until January 1859, when a labourer who had defaulted on his debts, Henry Elldridge, became the last person to be sentenced to this form of punishment in the town. The ground floor was converted for use as storage for the horse-drawn fire engine and a fire bell was installed on the front of the building just below the

eaves The eaves are the edges of the roof which overhang the face of a wall and, normally, project beyond the side of a building. The eaves form an overhang to throw water clear of the walls and may be highly decorated as part of an architectural sty ...

in 1865. The borough council, which had not met for many years, was abolished under the

Municipal Corporations Act 1883 A municipality is usually a single administrative division having corporate status and powers of self-government or jurisdiction as granted by national and regional laws to which it is subordinate. The term ''municipality'' may also mean the gov ...

. After extensive investigations to confirm the existing ownership of the property, the building was conveyed to a new charitable body, the Midhurst Town Trust, in February 1910. The fire service continued to occupy the ground floor until 1955, when the service relocated to a new fire station at The Wharf. The ground floor was then converted for use as an antiques centre, the Eagle House Antiques Market, in the 1960s, and, following a major refurbishment in 2010, the ground floor re-opened again as Garton's Coffee Shop.

References

{{reflist Buildings and structures completed in 1551 Government buildings completed in the 16th century City and town halls in West Sussex Grade II listed buildings in West Sussex Midhurst