Southwold Town Hall is a municipal building in the Market Place in

Southwold Southwold is a seaside town and civil parish on the English North Sea coast in the East Suffolk district of Suffolk. It lies at the mouth of the River Blyth within the Suffolk Coast and Heaths Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty. The town is a ...

Suffolk Suffolk () is a ceremonial county of England in East Anglia. It borders Norfolk to the north, Cambridgeshire to the west and Essex to the south; the North Sea lies to the east. The county town is Ipswich; other important towns include Lowes ...

, England. The building, which is the meeting place of Southwold Town Council, 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

The first municipal building in the town was an ancient guildhall which was destroyed in the great fire which engulfed the town in April 1659. A second town hall was built shortly after the

Battle of Solebay The naval Battle of Solebay took place on 28 May Old Style, 7 June New Style 1672 and was the first naval battle of the Third Anglo-Dutch War. The battle began as an attempted raid on Solebay port where an English fleet was anchored and large ...

in June 1672. It was a single-storey rectangular building on Bartholomew Green with a cottage attached. The historian,

Agnes Strickland Agnes Strickland (18 July 1796 – 8 July 1874) was an English historical writer and poet. She is particularly remembered for her ''Lives of the Queens of England'' (12 vols, 1840–1848). Biography The daughter of Thomas Strickland and his wi ...

, speculated that it may have been built as a hospital for the wounded from the battle. After the earlier building had been demolished in 1816, a third town hall, which was also used as a school, was built to the east of St Edmund's Church and was completed in around 1817. The current town hall was commissioned by a hotelier, Thomas Bokenham, as a private house in around 1810. Bokenham acquired the Swan Hotel, adjacent to his house, in 1819. He died in about 1846 and his wife, Elizabeth, was in ill-health by the mid-1850s. The building was acquired by the borough council and, by the late 19th century, was operating as a town hall. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with three bays facing onto the Market Place; in the left hand bay, there was a doorway with a rectangular

fanlight A fanlight is a form of lunette window, often semicircular or semi-elliptical in shape, with glazing bars or tracery sets radiating out like an open fan. It is placed over another window or a doorway, and is sometimes hinged to a transom. Th ...

flanked by

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 supporting an

entablature An entablature (; nativization of Italian , from "in" and "table") is the superstructure of moldings and bands which lies horizontally above columns, resting on their capitals. Entablatures are major elements of classical architecture, and ...

and 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 ...

. The other two bays on the ground floor formed an opening for the horse-drawn fire engine, while the bays on the first and second floors were fenestrated with

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 first floor, there was a

cast iron Cast iron is a class of iron–carbon alloys with a carbon content more than 2%. Its usefulness derives from its relatively low melting temperature. The alloy constituents affect its color when fractured: white cast iron has carbide impuriti ...

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 ...

which stretched the full width of the building. Internally, the principal room was the council chamber on the first floor. The building continued to serve as the headquarters of the borough council for much of the 20th century, but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged

Waveney District Council Waveney may refer to: * River Waveney, a river that forms the boundary between Suffolk and Norfolk, England * Waveney District, a local government district in Suffolk, England * Waveney (UK Parliament constituency) * Waveney class lifeboat, a class ...

was formed in 1974. Instead it became the meeting place of Southwold Town Council.

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1810 City and town halls in Suffolk Grade II listed buildings in Suffolk Southwold