Beaumaris Town Hall ( cy, Neuadd y Dref Biwmares) is a municipal building on Castle Street, in Beaumaris, Anglesey, Wales. The structure, which is the meeting place of Beaumaris Town Council, is a Grade II listed building.

History

The first municipal building in the town was an

Elizabethan The Elizabethan era is the epoch in the Tudor period of the history of England during the reign of Queen Elizabeth I (1558–1603). Historians often depict it as the golden age in English history. The symbol of Britannia (a female personifi ...

structure in Castle Street which was completed in 1563. By the late 18th century, it had become dilapidated and the local member of parliament and Irish Peer, Thomas Bulkeley, 7th Viscount Bulkeley, offered to pay for the construction of a new structure on the same site. The new building was designed in the neoclassical style, built in

gritstone Gritstone or grit is a hard, coarse-grained, siliceous sandstone. This term is especially applied to such sandstones that are quarried for building material. British gritstone was used for millstones to mill flour, to grind wood into pulp for pa ...

s and was completed in around 1785. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with five bays facing onto Castle Street; the ground floor, which was finished in rubble masonry, featured five round headed openings with voussoirs, while the first floor, which was finished in painted roughcast, was fenestrated by five

sash window A sash window or hung sash window is made of one or more movable panels, or "sashes". The individual sashes are traditionally paned window (architecture), paned windows, but can now contain an individual sheet (or sheets, in the case of double gla ...

s with rusticated

architrave In classical architecture, an architrave (; from it, architrave "chief beam", also called an epistyle; from Greek ἐπίστυλον ''epistylon'' "door frame") is the lintel or beam that rests on the capitals of columns. The term can ...

s and triple keystones. At roof level, there was a

modillion A modillion is an ornate bracket, more horizontal in shape and less imposing than a corbel. They are often seen underneath a cornice which it helps to support. Modillions are more elaborate than dentils (literally translated as small teeth). All ...

cornice In architecture, a cornice (from the Italian ''cornice'' meaning "ledge") is generally any horizontal decorative moulding that crowns a building or furniture element—for example, the cornice over a door or window, around the top edge of a ...

. Internally, the principal rooms were the market hall on the ground floor and the ballroom on the first floor. The latter room was described by the publisher of topographical dictionaries, Samuel Lewis, as "the most splendid ballroom in North Wales". A touring cinema company briefly offered silent film performances on a once weekly basis in the ballroom during the early part of the First World War. In January 1940, during the Second World War, after the cargo ship, SS ''Gleneden'', was hit by a German torpedo off Bardsey Island and then beached off Puffin Island, all 60 crew were rescued and given food and drink in the building. The town hall continued to serve as the meeting place of the borough council for much of the 20th century, but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged Ynys Môn-Isle of Anglesey Borough Council was formed at Llangefni in 1974. Instead, it became the meeting place of Beaumaris Town Council. Shop fronts were installed in the central three openings to a design by Colwyn Foulkes and Partners of Colwyn Bay in 1975.

References

{{Government buildings in Wales Beaumaris City and town halls in Wales Grade II listed buildings in Anglesey Government buildings completed in 1785