| Description | This competition winning design of 1869 by Lockwood and Mawson was completed in 1873. The Town Hall was then extended in 1905 9 to the designs of Norman Shaw and executed by the city architect F E P Edwards. Lockwood and Mawson’s building, intended by the city to compete with the Leeds and Halifax town halls, occupies a triangular site. The elevations of Gaisby rock sandstone, rising through three storeys and an attic with steep pitched roofs, are treated in an early to mid 13th century Gothic style. It is dominated by the 200 ft campanile tower of Tuscan derivation. The original competition designs, considerably influenced by Burges and Scott, show a bowed corner at the apex of the site but in execution this became a polygonal terminal feature. There is massive ashlar block to the ground floor, with sandstone ashlar dressings to the upper floors. The longest frontage is towards Tyrell Street. The top floor is treated as a continuous arcade articulated by statues of kings and queens in canopied niches.
Norman Shaw’s elevations are a brilliant and witty amalgam of styles, with features drawn from previous works in his career, yet respectful of Lockwood and Mawson’s (English Heritage, 1963). Gothic, Romanesque Gothic and Queen Anne with rococo ironwork, rise one above the other, capped off by two storey gabled attics of French Gothic derivation. The massive, gabled, southwest corner has a lofty mullioned hall window lighting the dining hall and a corbelled spire capped turret inset between the latter and the return. All this is built in fine quality ashlar, the south link range being of sandstone ‘brick’ above the ground floor. There is a visual break in the roof line between the two buildings as the council did not approve plans for the addition of attic storeys to the original building.
The main entrance hall and staircase in Baroque marble were completed by William Williamson in 1913 14. The Town Hall still dominates the centre of Bradford with its campanile as a prominent landmark. |