History
Newry's town hall was designed by William Batt. It was built on a three-arched bridge over the Clanrye River in 1893 by the old Newry Town Commissioners.
The Clanrye River, which runs through the heart of Newry, forms part of the border between County Down and County Armagh and hence the Town Hall was built over it, to meet the needs of the people from both sides of the growing town. Whilst the council moved its debating chambers to Monaghan Row in the 1980s, the Town Hall serves today a mostly ceremonial function. It features a large hall that is often used for concerts and drama productions as well as the annual Newry Musical Feis.
U2 played the venue in 1980 and were reportedly booed off stage.
The granite monument in the forefront of the picture was erected in honour of local man Terence Bannon, who, on June 1, 2003, became the first citizen of Newry to conquer Mount Everest.
Read more about this topic: Newry Town Hall
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“To care for the quarrels of the past, to identify oneself passionately with a cause that became, politically speaking, a losing cause with the birth of the modern world, is to experience a kind of straining against reality, a rebellious nonconformity that, again, is rare in America, where children are instructed in the virtues of the system they live under, as though history had achieved a happy ending in American civics.”
—Mary McCarthy (1912–1989)
“When the landscape buckles and jerks around, when a dust column of debris rises from the collapse of a block of buildings on bodies that could have been your own, when the staves of history fall awry and the barrel of time bursts apart, some turn to prayer, some to poetry: words in the memory, a stained book carried close to the body, the notebook scribbled by hand—a center of gravity.”
—Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)