Background Until 1813, the seat of
Leeds Corporation was the
Moot Hall of 1618, on
Briggate, which was also used for judicial purposes. Leeds went through a period of rapid growth in the first half of the 19th century and by the mid-19th century it became apparent that the court house was no longer large enough for the functions it performed; it was demolished in 1825 and replaced by a new court house on
Park Row. The neighbouring town of
Bradford, the "wool capital of the world", took the lead in trying to elevate industrial Yorkshire towns with stately, grand architecture by building
St George's Hall in 1851–53. It was a new status symbol, and as there was perpetual competition between Leeds and Bradford, calls grew within Leeds for its own town hall. The physician and social reformer Dr John Deakin Heaton became a major advocate and campaigner for a town hall, having visited Europe and enviously remarked on the "famous old cities whose Town Halls are the permanent glory of the inhabitants and the standing wonder and delight of visitors from a distance". His, and other supporters', belief was that "if a noble municipal palace that might fairly view with some of the best Town Halls of the Continent were to be erected in the middle of their hitherto squalid and unbeautiful town, it would become a practical admonition to the populace of the value of beauty and art, and in course of time men would learn to live up to it". In July 1850, Leeds Town Council held a public meeting, the decision of which was that a "large public hall" should be built. Emulating St George's Hall, the council proposed to sell shares in the building to the value of £10 () but there was little public interest. In October, a councillor proposed introducing a specific
rate levied to fund its construction instead of using a joint stock company. A decision was deferred until after the municipal election of November 1850 to give ratepayers a chance to express their views. The town hall was approved in January 1851 when the motion was put to the council and carried by twenty-four votes to twelve. The resolution read: "As the attempt to raise funds by public subscription has failed, it is the opinion of this Council desirable to erect a Town Hall, including suitable corporate buildings". The sum voted was £22,000 for the building and £9,500 for the land. It was intended to represent Leeds's emergence as an important industrial centre during the
Industrial Revolution and symbolise civic pride and confidence. A council committee was established to assess the opinions of Leeds's inhabitants. It sent delegations to other large towns including Manchester and Liverpool to investigate their plans for building public halls. In July 1851, it presented a report, with consultees including
Joseph Paxton, the designer of
The Crystal Palace. The report's recommendation identified a site for the hall on what was then Park Lane (since redeveloped into the Headrow) which contained Park House and its gardens. This site was on the edge of the town centre of the time, but the project required a large parcel of land that was unavailable in the congested central streets. It was purchased from a wealthy merchant named John Blayds for the sum of £9,500 (). The scheme did not secure universal backing immediately; a council motion in February 1852 proposed it was "unwise and inexpedient to proceed with the Hall". This, and other motions to limit its costs, were defeated by small majorities, but they demonstrated that financial prudence was a strong compulsion for some Victorian local politicians, who disliked incurring civic expense without genuine proof of public advantage. These happened to be in a minority in Leeds, which in the same year backed other large projects such as installing sewers for the city. Support among the public and interest groups also helped – the
Leeds Philosophical and Literary Society was in strong support of the hall, as was the recently formed Leeds Improvement Society (despite its doubts on the council's competence to deliver it). Heaton, its secretary, reminded dissatisfied ratepayers throughout the decade that the Town Hall was important if the city were to discard its image of being an architectural backwater with few buildings of merit. File:Parklanemap1847.jpg|Park Lane in 1847; a small park lies on the site of the Town Hall. File:Parkhousemap1852.jpg|An 1852 map showing Park House, now the site of the Town Hall File:Leeds town hall first drawing.jpg|First drawing for the proposed Town Hall (c. 1852) File:Leeds Town Hall plan.jpg|Ground plan of the Town Hall
Design Leeds Town Council tendered for designs from architects in 1852, in an
open competition, a common method of selecting architects for important buildings in the 19th century. The brief was for a kind of building that did not yet exist in England, combining under one roof the functions of moot halls, concert rooms, and courthouses, along with municipal offices and a suite of reception rooms for the mayor. Even the monumental edifice of
St George's Hall,
Liverpool, only contained a public hall, a small concert hall, and assize courts. The ambitious brief also asked for space for 8,000 people, but the relatively modest budget attracted ridicule, and costs did indeed rise throughout the project. The "Instructions to Architects" made no prescription about which style the design should use, the use of the prevalent
Neoclassical style being the unwritten assumption.
Sir Charles Barry, at the time still occupied rebuilding the
Palace of Westminster, was persuaded to advise the Town Hall Committee in their judging, which gave the competition considerable status. Premiums of £200, £100, and £50 were awarded to the first, second and third-placed entrants. Only sixteen entries were received, which was fewer than expected, perhaps due to combination of the small prize amounts and the Council's non-commitment to employing the winning architect. Entries were anonymised and entered under
noms de plume for impartiality. A design entered under the name "
Honor alit Artes" was recommended by Charles Barry, and the contract was revealed to have been won by
Cuthbert Brodrick, a young architect from
Hull who was unknown outside his home town. He had travelled extensively in Europe in 1844–45 and acquired a love for its classical architecture. He was only twenty-nine when he won the competition for the Town Hall, but later designed some of Victorian Leeds's noted landmarks – the
Corn Exchange,
Mechanics' Institute and Cookridge Street Swimming Baths. The major elements of Brodrick's design used a distinctly Roman style, quite different from any of the others submitted, which used a strong entrance colonnade and rectangular plan, and took inspiration from French buildings of recent decades. Barry may have been attracted to its rationality, order, and logic. His first design included recesses on its east and west sides, but this was soon updated with extra offices, resulting in a commanding rectangular mass. The Town Hall Committee initially had reservations after selecting Brodrick, mostly relating to his youth, and asked Barry for confirmation of Brodrick's abilities in the construction of such a large building; Barry responded with high praise: that he was "fully satisfied that the Council might trust [Brodrick] with the most perfect safety", and that "a building constructed according to these plans would be the most perfect gem out of London". and Benjamin Musgrave, a dyer. It was for £41,835 and included a completion target of 1 January 1856; both elements eventually turned out to have been greatly underestimated. The building is mostly of local Yorkshire stone, but the problems of finding enough large blocks of sufficient quality meant using millstone grit from 17 different quarries, which led to worries about whether the colour would match.
Rawdon Hill stone was favoured for those parts of the building on which there would be carving; Derbyshire gritstone formed many of the columns. The foundation stone was laid on 17 August 1853, by the mayor, John Hope Shaw. Sizeable crowds were present at the ceremony, in which the Mayor placed into the stone's cavity some items of the era to form a
time capsule, including coins and newspapers, and laid mortar on the stone with a silver trowel (
on public display at Leeds City Museum). Subsequent speeches were followed by a long procession consisting of
brass bands, Brodrick, magistrates, members of the council, and others. Celebrations continued with a civic banquet, festivities on
Woodhouse Moor, and fireworks. During the works, Brodrick is reported as being "determined to see the scheme through 'whatever the cost'". Recurrent complaints include slow progress, poor workmanship, poor quality of stone, and insufficient
through stones; Atack and Musgrave were more used to building mills than fine, large-scale public buildings. A January 1854 note from the diary records that Musgrave "objected to the dressing of so much of the face of the rubble walling generally and the expensive manner in which [he was] required to execute the wall". It would take the form of a cupola supported on columns akin to the Corinthian columns of the south facade. It is likely that Brodrick designed a tower before building even started, as suggested by such facts as its support from influential lobbyists from the outset, and the foundation walls being enlarged prematurely so that one could be added. Charles Barry too had suggested a cupola or small tower in early stages, to divert attention from an arched glazed roof which showed above the parapet. A firm named Addy and Nicholls was appointed contractors for the tower and interior work. closely followed by the clock mechanism, installed by
Dent of London (the dials designed by
Edmund Beckett Denison, installed by
Potts) one storey above the bell. The grand entrance hall originally envisaged, with a screen of columns leading to the great hall, had to be abandoned in favour of a cramped vestibule to support the tower above, but this was considered a worthy price for the extra drama and power a tower would provide. The film-maker
Jonathan Meades reflected that the "symbolic, representative function of Leeds Town Hall increased during the period of its gestation and construction. In Brodrick's earlier scheme, the only thing that rose above its uninflected parapet was a low storey reminiscent of a theatre's
fly tower in the centre. A magnificently sullen, passive building was transformed into a magnificently sullen, aggressive one, at the behest of the hall's promoters".
Later changes Further modifications to the Town Hall continued to be made after its opening, beginning with the entrance steps being changed in part to semi-circular in the 1860s, Brodrick suggesting in 1867 that a larger skylight be put in each of the courts, The Council had even established a sub-committee for street decorations – flags, banners and streamers lined the streets of the city. She stayed the night at Woodsley House on Clarendon Road, the home of the Mayor, Peter Fairbairn, with tight military security. The day was combined with an exhibition of local manufactures, held in the
Cloth Hall, and a music festival.
William Sterndale Bennett was appointed conductor and was commissioned to write a pastoral
The May Queen for the occasion. The festival opened with
Mendelssohn's
Elijah and closed with
Handel's
Messiah.
Leeds City Police were reinforced with officers from the West Riding, Bradford, London and Birmingham. Local reporters delightedly proclaimed that on that day, as the head of the Empire was in Leeds, the town was briefly her capital. The building was officially opened on 7 September by Queen Victoria and
Prince Albert, though the tower was still incomplete. Vast crowds turned out to watch the royal procession, including 32,000 schoolchildren assembled on Woodhouse Moor. She proceeded from the Mayor's home down Woodhouse Lane to
the city centre and back up to the top of East Parade where a temporary triumphal arch had been constructed to frame the building. The route had been carefully planned so Victoria and Albert could see much of the town without glimpsing the new Town Hall. With a red carpet and military band on the steps, they entered the building, she knighted the Mayor, and then the hall was declared open on her behalf by the Prime Minister, the
Earl of Derby. Later, the Queen was escorted to
Wellington station to travel north to
Balmoral. On 22 September 1858, only a fortnight after the opening of the Town Hall, the
British Association for the Advancement of Science held its annual meeting in Leeds. For many years Leeds had wanted to host a meeting of the British Association, and the building of a large hall made this possible. Since then many meetings, conferences, and exhibitions have been held in the Town Hall. In the 19th century, some major trials were held here, including those of
Charles Peace in 1879, and
Kate Dover in 1882. The Town Hall and entirely new Victoria Square, built on the site of a single house and garden, and which when completed was completely outsize for what was a residential area, effectively altered the balance of the whole town and led to a great development northwards and westwards from
City Square, the former centre.
20th century Leeds Civic Hall, on a nearby site further up Calverley Street, was commissioned in 1929 in a
Keynesian project intended to provide work for the local unemployed. The Civic Hall opened in 1933 as the seat of Leeds City Council; the Council Chamber of the Town Hall was converted to a courtroom. On 14 and 15 March 1941, Leeds was
bombed by the
Luftwaffe. Houses were destroyed in inner-city districts and bombs dropped on the city centre, hitting the east side of the Town Hall, causing significant damage to its roof and walls on Calverley Street. The damage was repaired shortly after, but evidence still remains in Victoria Gardens. For the duration of
World War II, the Town Hall crypt housed an
ARP post and from 1942 a
British Restaurant, where people could enjoy cheap, hot food, which proved popular after the war, being refurbished in 1960 before closing in 1966. In 1951, the Town Hall was designated a Grade I
listed building, a status applied to structures of exceptional architectural and historic interest, and which offers statutory protection against unauthorised demolition or modification. For much of the 20th century, the Town Hall was left blackened by soot and smoke from the industrial city surrounding it. In spring 1972 the building was given its first official clean-up – on previous occasions it had been hosed down by the fire brigade – which revealed much of the detailed stonework. This was strongly opposed by the
Leeds Civic Trust, which preferred that its blackness "should stand as a symbol of the city's industrial past and as a reminder to future generations of the air pollution which the city is so successfully combatting".
21st century A major refurbishment project of the whole building commenced in 2019, funded by Leeds City Council's capital fund, with a public campaign funding some interior renovation costs. The three-year works will provide new seating and soundproofing, new bars and public event spaces in previously blocked-off rooms, comprehensive interior redecoration, modifications to two chandeliers to use dimmable LEDS, relocation of the box office to the ground level. The Scottish firm
Page\Park Architects is responsible for all scheme designs. Works are also taking place to the clock tower and roof, including replacement of all tiles with Welsh slate; the roof project is being designed and managed by NPS Group. As part of the roof works, contractors discovered on the dome a plaque dated 1861 placed by the last men to work on it. The plaque reads: "This dome was stripped and old lead put on after by Herbert Westcombe and Joseph Nett". The building is scheduled to reopen in 2022 in time for the Leeds 2023 city-wide cultural festival. In 2019, a time capsule was installed in the clock tower, assembled by a group of young people working with
Leeds Museums and Galleries. The capsule contains items such as a
Nando's menu, nine
Lego minifigures, a mobile phone, Leeds Owl artwork and a Refugee Education Training Advice Service cookery book donated by a woman who moved from Syria to Leeds in 2018. ==Present usage==