Sheffield Town Hall is a building in the City of Sheffield, England. The building is used by Sheffield City Council, and also contains a publicly displayed collection of silverware. The current building, Sheffield's fourth town hall, is located on Pinstone Street. It was designed by the London-based architect E. W. Mountford and constructed over a seven-year period from 1890 to 1897, opening on 21 May 1897. An extension designed by F. E. P. Edwards was completed in 1923.
The design echoed to a certain extent the architecture of the adjacent St. Paul's Church of 1720 (now demolished). The exterior is built of "Stoke" stone from the Stoke Hall Quarry in Grindleford, Derbyshire and is decorated with carvings by F. W. Pomeroy. The friezes depict the industries of Sheffield, and the 64 metre high clock-tower is surmounted by a statue of Vulcan. During construction, the building was criticised for its expensive embellishments.
The building was opened by Queen Victoria, using a remote control lock from her carriage. The turning of the key in the lock triggered a light in the building which was the signal for three concealed men to open the gates.
Read more about Sheffield Town Hall: Interior, Previous Buildings, Sheffield Peace Gardens, The New Town Hall Extension
Famous quotes containing the words town and/or hall:
“Let us have a good many maples and hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw loose, an essential part is wanting.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“When Western people train the mind, the focus is generally on the left hemisphere of the cortex, which is the portion of the brain that is concerned with words and numbers. We enhance the logical, bounded, linear functions of the mind. In the East, exercises of this sort are for the purpose of getting in tune with the unconscious—to get rid of boundaries, not to create them.”
—Edward T. Hall (b. 1914)