page_title: Rochdale Town Hall
section_title: Interior
hierarchical_section_title: Rochdale Town Hall / Features / Interior
caption_attribution_description: English: Etching of Grand Staircase
context_page_description: Rochdale Town Hall is a Victorian-era municipal building in Rochdale, Greater Manchester, England. It is "widely recognised as being one of the finest municipal buildings in the country", and is recorded in the National Heritage List for England as a designated Grade I listed building. The Town Hall functions as the ceremonial headquarters of Rochdale Metropolitan Borough Council and houses local government departments, including the borough's civil registration office.
  Built in the Gothic Revival style at a cost of £160,000, it was inaugurated for the governance of the Municipal Borough of Rochdale on 27 September 1871. The architect, William Henry Crossland, was the winner of a competition held in 1864 to design a new Town Hall. It had a 240-foot clock tower topped by a wooden spire with a gilded statue of Saint George and the Dragon, both of which were destroyed by fire on 10 April 1883, leaving the building without a spire for four years. A new 190-foot stone clock tower and spire in the style of Manchester Town Hall was designed by Alfred Waterhouse, and erected in 1887.
  Art critic Nikolaus Pevsner described the building as possessing a "rare picturesque beauty".
context_section_description: Murals in the former council chamber depict the inventions that drove the Industrial Revolution, and the Great Hall is adorned with a large fresco of the signing of Magna Carta by artist Henry Holiday, although the painting is dirty. Responsibility for the decoration of the interior was given to Heaton, Butler and Bayne, who incorporated floor tiles that were manufactured by Mintons and decorated with the local insignia and the Royal coat of arms of the United Kingdom. The stone Grand Staircase, which leads from the vestibule to the Great Hall, is decorated with stained glass; such glass windows decorate most of the Town Hall and are considered to be the finest example of the work of Heaton, Butler and Bayne.  The medieval style Great Hall, described by Pevsner as a room of "great splendour and simplicity", has a hammerbeam roof flanked by statues of angels, in a design that resembles Westminster Hall.
caption: Etching of the Grand staircase by William Henry Crossland, 1871
exif: {}