Reigate Town Hall is a municipal building in Castlefield Road,

Reigate Reigate ( ) is a town status in the United Kingdom, town in Surrey, England, around south of central London. The settlement is recorded in Domesday Book in 1086 as ''Cherchefelle'' and first appears with its modern name in the 1190s. The earlie ...

Surrey Surrey () is a ceremonial and non-metropolitan county in South East England, bordering Greater London to the south west. Surrey has a large rural area, and several significant urban areas which form part of the Greater London Built-up Area. ...

, England. The town hall, which is the meeting place of

Reigate and Banstead Borough Council Reigate ( ) is a town in Surrey, England, around south of central London. The settlement is recorded in Domesday Book in 1086 as ''Cherchefelle'' and first appears with its modern name in the 1190s. The earliest archaeological evidence for hum ...

, is a Grade II

listed building In the United Kingdom, a listed building or listed structure is one that has been placed on one of the four statutory lists maintained by Historic England in England, Historic Environment Scotland in Scotland, in Wales, and the Northern Irel ...

History

New Council Chamber, Reigate Town Hall - geograph

The building was commissioned to replace the

old town hall Old or OLD may refer to: Places * Old, Baranya, Hungary * Old, Northamptonshire, England *Old Street station, a railway and tube station in London (station code OLD) *OLD, IATA code for Old Town Municipal Airport and Seaplane Base, Old Town, ...

with had been built on the north side of the High Street in 1798. After civic leaders found that the old building was inadequate for their needs, they decided to procure a new town hall: the site they selected had previously been open land to the east of

Reigate Castle Reigate Castle is a former castle in the town of Reigate in the county of Surrey, England. None of the castle buildings survive today, but a cave below the site, considered to be part of the castle, still exists. Known as "Baron's Cave", it is occa ...

. The new town hall was designed by Macintosh and Newman in the Arts and Crafts style, built at a cost of £25,000 and completed in 1901. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with twelve bays facing onto Castlefield Road with the end three bays at each end projected forward as

pavilion In architecture, ''pavilion'' has several meanings: * It may be a subsidiary building that is either positioned separately or as an attachment to a main building. Often it is associated with pleasure. In palaces and traditional mansions of Asia ...

s with

hipped roof A hip roof, hip-roof or hipped roof, is a type of roof where all sides slope downwards to the walls, usually with a fairly gentle slope (although a tented roof by definition is a hipped roof with steeply pitched slopes rising to a peak). Thus, ...

s and

turret Turret may refer to: * Turret (architecture), a small tower that projects above the wall of a building * Gun turret, a mechanism of a projectile-firing weapon * Objective turret, an indexable holder of multiple lenses in an optical microscope * Mi ...

s; the central section of six bays featured a doorway in the penultimate bay from the left which gave access to the municipal buildings wing located on the left, as well as a doorway in the penultimate bay from the right which gave access to the courthouse and police wing located on the right. Above the two doorways were modified stained glass

Venetian window A Venetian window (also known as a Serlian window) is a large tripartite window which is a key element in Palladian architecture. Although Sebastiano Serlio (1475–1554) did not invent it, the window features largely in the work of the Italian a ...

s (decorated with rose motifs on the municipal buildings side and the Royal

coat of arms A coat of arms is a heraldry, heraldic communication design, visual design on an escutcheon (heraldry), escutcheon (i.e., shield), surcoat, or tabard (the latter two being outer garments). The coat of arms on an escutcheon forms the central ele ...

on the courthouse side) with gables above. Internally, the principal rooms were the council chamber, which was decorated in an

Art Nouveau Art Nouveau (; ) is an international style of art, architecture, and applied art, especially the decorative arts. The style is known by different names in different languages: in German, in Italian, in Catalan, and also known as the Modern ...

style with a fine ceiling, in the municipal buildings wing, and the magistrates' court, which was oak panelled, in the courthouse wing. The fire station, which featured a four-storey tower with a

pagoda A pagoda is an Asian tiered tower with multiple eaves common to Nepal, India, China, Japan, Korea, Myanmar, Vietnam, and other parts of Asia. Most pagodas were built to have a religious function, most often Buddhist but sometimes Taoist, ...

style roof, formed a separate structure to the left. After the

First World War World War I (28 July 1914 11 November 1918), often abbreviated as WWI, was one of the deadliest global conflicts in history. Belligerents included much of Europe, the Russian Empire, the United States, and the Ottoman Empire, with fightin ...

, a memorial board was hung on a wall in the town hall to commemorate the lives of local service personnel who had died in the war. The building served as the headquarters of Reigate Municipal Borough Council and remained the local seat of government when the enlarged

was formed in 1974. The borough council secured access to the whole complex once the police had moved to Cherchefelle in 1943, the fire service had moved to Croydon Road in 1955 and the courts service had moved to Hatchlands Road in the early 1970s. Works of art in the town hall include a landscape by

Henry Tanworth Wells Henry Tanworth Wells (14 December 1828 – 16 January 1903) was an English miniature and portrait painter. He was a member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle though he painted in the academic style. His most popular painting was ''Victoria Regi ...

depicting a cart being loaded at a quarry at Holmbury Hill and painting by George Hooper depicting a garden at

Loxwood Loxwood is a small village and civil parish with several outlying settlements, in the Chichester district of West Sussex, England, within the Low Weald. The Wey and Arun Canal passes to the East and South of the village. This Civil Parish is at t ...

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1901 City and town halls in Surrey Reigate Grade II listed buildings in Surrey