Beeston Town Hall is a municipal building in Foster Avenue in

Beeston, Nottinghamshire Beeston is a town in the Borough of Broxtowe, Nottinghamshire, England, south-west of Nottingham city centre. To its north-east is the University of Nottingham's main campus, University Park. The pharmaceutical and retail chemist group Boots h ...

, England. The building was formerly the offices of Beeston and Stapleford Urban District Council and is now used by the Redeemer Church.

History

Following significant population growth, largely associated with the lace and hosiery industries, the area became an

urban district Urban district may refer to: * District * Urban area * Quarter (urban subdivision) * Neighbourhood Specific subdivisions in some countries: * Urban districts of Denmark * Urban districts of Germany * Urban district (Great Britain and Ireland) (hist ...

in 1894. The early meetings of the new council were held at the Board Schools until the council commissioned its own offices at a site on Church Street in 1897. In the mid-1930s, the council decided that the old council offices were inadequate: the site they selected for the new town hall was open land on the west side of Foster Avenue. The old council officers were demolished during a wave of the redevelopment in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The new town hall was designed by

Evans, Clark and Woollatt Evans, Clark and Wollatt was an architectural practice based in Nottingham from the early 1920s to 1948. History The practice was established by Robert Evans, John Thomas Clark and John Woollatt by 1921. Robert Evans died in 1927, and John Thomas ...

in the Neo-Georgian style, built by Hofton and Son in red brick with stone dressings at a cost of £18,500 and was officially opened on 24 March 1938. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with seven bays facing onto Foster Avenue; the central bay featured a double-panelled doorway flanked by brick

pilaster In classical architecture Classical architecture usually denotes architecture which is more or less consciously derived from the principles of Greek and Roman architecture of classical antiquity, or sometimes even more specifically, from the ...

s and

bracket A bracket is either of two tall fore- or back-facing punctuation marks commonly used to isolate a segment of text or data from its surroundings. Typically deployed in symmetric pairs, an individual bracket may be identified as a 'left' or 'r ...

s supporting a stone

balcony A balcony (from it, balcone, "scaffold") is a platform projecting from the wall of a building, supported by columns or console brackets, and enclosed with a balustrade, usually above the ground floor. Types The traditional Maltese balcony is ...

with an

ogive An ogive ( ) is the roundly tapered end of a two-dimensional or three-dimensional object. Ogive curves and surfaces are used in engineering, architecture and woodworking. Etymology The earliest use of the word ''ogive'' is found in the 13th c ...

-shaped window on the first floor. The middle bays in the outer sections featured

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 on the ground floor and

terracotta Terracotta, terra cotta, or terra-cotta (; ; ), in its material sense as an earthenware substrate, is a clay-based ceramic glaze, unglazed or glazed ceramic where the pottery firing, fired body is porous. In applied art, craft, construction, a ...

carvings of

beehive A beehive is an enclosed structure in which some honey bee species of the subgenus '' Apis'' live and raise their young. Though the word ''beehive'' is commonly used to describe the nest of any bee colony, scientific and professional literature ...

s, a play on the name of the town, on the first floor, while the other bays in the outer sections were fenestrated by sash windows. At roof level, there was a

frieze In architecture, the frieze is the wide central section part of an entablature and may be plain in the Ionic or Doric order, or decorated with bas-reliefs. Paterae are also usually used to decorate friezes. Even when neither columns nor ...

and a

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 ...

, broken by a central

pediment Pediments are gables, usually of a triangular shape. Pediments are placed above the horizontal structure of the lintel, or entablature, if supported by columns. Pediments can contain an overdoor and are usually topped by hood moulds. A pedimen ...

. Internally, the principal room was the council chamber. The town hall continued to serve as the meeting place of Beeston Urban District Council until 1935, of the enlarged

Beeston and Stapleford Urban District Beeston and Stapleford was an urban district in Nottinghamshire, England, from 1935 to 1974. It was created by a County Review Order. Beeston had previously been part of Beeston Urban District itself, to which was added the entirety of th ...

from 1935 to 1974 and of the further enlarged

Broxtowe Borough Council Broxtowe refers to a number of geographic entities, current and historic, in Nottinghamshire, England: * Broxtowe, Nottingham, a housing estate in Apsley ward, within the City of Nottingham * Broxtowe (UK Parliament constituency), the constituency ...

from 1974. In 1980, the town hall was the venue for the public inquiry into the proposed demolition of the

Bennerley Viaduct The Bennerley Viaduct is a disused railway viaduct spanning the Erewash Valley between Awsworth (Nottinghamshire) and Ilkeston (Derbyshire) in central England. It was built in 1877 but closed to rail traffic in 1968, as part of the Beeching cuts ...

which was ultimately saved. The council established new council offices on the opposite side of Foster Avenue and moved its headquarters there in the early 1990s. In 2005, the first annual Beeston Carnival took place: the focal point of the event was the parade, led by Beeston Pipe Band, from the town hall to

Broadgate Park Broadgate Park is a self-catered hall of residence at the University of Nottingham, accommodating under-graduate and post-graduate students. Housing about 2400 students and containing 2,223 rooms, it is one of the largest student villages in E ...

. The council decided that the town hall was surplus to requirements in 2018 and, despite opposition from local community groups, sold the building to the Redeemer Church for £425,000 in January 2020.

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1938 City and town halls in Nottinghamshire Beeston, Nottinghamshire