Towcester Town Hall is a municipal building in Watling Street,

Towcester Towcester ( ) is a market town and civil parish in the West Northamptonshire unitary authority area of Northamptonshire, England. From 1974 to 2021, it was the administrative centre of the South Northamptonshire district. Towcester is on ...

Northamptonshire Northamptonshire ( ; abbreviated Northants.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East Midlands of England. It is bordered by Leicestershire, Rutland and Lincolnshire to the north, Cambridgeshire to the east, Bedfordshi ...

, England. The town hall, which is the meeting place of Towcester Town Council, 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

After significant population growth during the early 19th century associated with the town's role as a coaching stop on Watling Street, a turnpike road which had been paved by the engineer,

Thomas Telford Thomas Telford (9 August 1757 – 2 September 1834) was a Scottish civil engineer. After establishing himself as an engineer of road and canal projects in Shropshire, he designed numerous infrastructure projects in his native Scotland, as well ...

, local businessmen decided to form a company to develop a town hall and

corn exchange A corn exchange is a building where merchants trade grains. The word "corn" in British English denotes all cereal grains, such as wheat and barley; in the United States these buildings were called grain exchanges. Such trade was common in towns ...

: the site chosen was a prominent location in the market place which clearly defined its southern boundary. The foundation stone for the building was laid by the Earl of Pomfret, who lived at Easton Neston house, on 8 September 1865. It was designed by Thomas Heygate Vernon in the

Italianate style The Italianate style was a distinct 19th-century phase in the history of Classical architecture. Like Palladianism and Neoclassicism, the Italianate style combined its inspiration from the models and architectural vocabulary of 16th-century Ita ...

, built by John Wheeler with

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 ...

masonry and was completed in 1866. It was constructed using

Bath stone Bath Stone is an oolitic limestone comprising granular fragments of calcium carbonate originally obtained from the Middle Jurassic aged Great Oolite Group of the Combe Down and Bathampton Down Mines under Combe Down, Somerset, England. Its h ...

, with contrasting bands of

Duston Duston is a suburb of Northampton and a civil parish in West Northamptonshire, England. History Archaeological remains found in the area suggest that Duston has roots in Prehistoric and Roman settlements. However, development in the area ...

stone. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with three bays facing onto Chantry Lane; the central bay, which slightly projected forward, featured a round headed doorway flanked by

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 and

brackets A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. They come in four main pairs of shapes, as given in the box to the right, which also gives their n ...

supporting a stone

parapet A parapet is a barrier that is an upward extension of a wall at the edge of a roof, terrace, balcony, walkway or other structure. The word comes ultimately from the Italian ''parapetto'' (''parare'' 'to cover/defend' and ''petto'' 'chest/brea ...

; there were two small rounded headed

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 separated by a colonette and flanked by pilasters on the first floor and a carved pediment above. The outer bays featured two large round headed sash windows separated by pilasters on the ground floor and three small rounded headed windows separated by colonettes on the first floor. The design was modified at a late stage to include a

clock tower Clock towers are a specific type of structure that 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 building ...

at roof level with a

zinc Zinc is a chemical element; it has symbol Zn and atomic number 30. It is a slightly brittle metal at room temperature and has a shiny-greyish appearance when oxidation is removed. It is the first element in group 12 (IIB) of the periodic tabl ...

-clad

belfry The belfry /ˈbɛlfri/ is a structure enclosing bells for ringing as part of a building, usually as part of a bell tower or steeple. It can also refer to the entire tower or building, particularly in continental Europe for such a tower attached ...

, (the addition of a clock having been made possible through

subscription The subscription business model is a business model in which a customer must pay a recurring price at regular intervals for access to a product or service. The model was pioneered by publishers of books and periodicals in the 17th century. It ...

donations from 'the ladies of Towcester and the neighbourhood'). The clock was made by Moore & Sons of Clerkenwell, but (as was not unusual at the time) appears to have been credited to a local clockmaker: Arthur Garrett of Towcester (whose name is visible just below the face of the clock). Internally, the principal room was the public hall; there was also a working men's reading room, a working men's coffee room and several offices, as well as a shop and a private residence. On 29 March 1880 the clock tower and part of the surrounding roof were destroyed by a fire; following rebuilding a new clock and bell were provided by Gillett, Bland & Co. The building remained privately owned until 1935 when it was bought by Towcester Rural District Council for £2,250 to use as their meeting place and offices; the council had previously met at the workhouse on Brackley Road and had its offices in various locations around the town. The building remained the local seat of government after the larger South Northamptonshire District Council replaced the rural district council in 1974. South Northamptonshire District Council moved to a new building at the junction of Springfields and Brackley Road in 1983. The town hall then became the responsibility of Towcester Parish Council, which renamed itself Towcester Town Council in 1986. Although the committee room on the ground floor was leased out to estate agents, Bartram & Co. in January 2018, the public hall has continued to be used for concerts and community events.

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1866 City and town halls in Northamptonshire Towcester Grade II listed buildings in Northamptonshire Corn exchanges in England