The building was commissioned to replace the aging
town hall, now the city museum, in Market Square. The new building was designed by
Edward Mountford and
Thomas Lucas in the
Edwardian Baroque style and the stonework, furniture and carvings were undertaken by
Waring & Gillow. The facility accommodated a police station in the basement and a magistrates' court on the ground floor and it included an assembly hall, to the rear of the main building, which became known as the "Ashton Hall". The whole complex, as well as the
Queen Victoria Memorial in
Dalton Square, had been personally financed by
Lord Ashton who officially opened the facility on 27 December 1909. A war memorial, designed by Thomas Mawson & Sons together with the Bromsgrove School of Art and sculpted by Morton of Cheltenham, was unveiled by the mayor, George Jackson, in a memorial garden adjacent to the town hall, on 3 December 1924. Highly publicised cases to come before the courtroom on the ground floor of the town hall included the initial stages of the trial of Dr
Buck Ruxton, who in 1935, was accused of murdering both his wife and his housemaid.
Queen Elizabeth II, accompanied by the
Duke of Edinburgh, visited the town hall in her new capacity as
Duke of Lancaster on 13 April 1955. The town hall became the headquarters of Municipal Borough of Lancaster on completion but following the amalgamation of the Municipal Borough of Lancaster with the
Municipal Borough of Morecambe and Heysham in 1974, meetings of the full council of the
City of Lancaster have been held in
Morecambe Town Hall. Episode 14 of series 28 of the
Antiques Roadshow, which was broadcast on 14 March 2014, was filmed in the Ashton Hall within the complex. The courts service had moved to a new building in 1985, but the old magistrates' court within the town hall was brought back into use as an emergency '
Nightingale Court' during the
COVID-19 pandemic. The Ashton Hall was similarly used as an emergency Crown Court. ==Gallery==