Spennymoor Town Hall is a municipal building in

Spennymoor Spennymoor is a town and civil parish in County Durham (district), County Durham, England. It is south of the River Wear and is south of Durham, England, Durham. The civil parish includes the villages of Kirk Merrington, Middlestone Moor, Byers ...

County Durham County Durham ( ), officially simply Durham,UK General Acts 1997 c. 23Lieutenancies Act 1997 Schedule 1(3). From legislation.gov.uk, retrieved 6 April 2022. is a ceremonial county in North East England.North East Assembly �About North East E ...

, England. The town hall is the meeting place of Spennymoor Town Council.

History

After population growth associated with the increasing number of

coal mine Coal mining is the process of extracting coal from the ground. Coal is valued for its energy content and since the 1880s has been widely used to generate electricity. Steel and cement industries use coal as a fuel for extraction of iron from ...

s in the town, the

local board of health Local boards or local boards of health were local authorities in urban areas of England and Wales from 1848 to 1894. They were formed in response to cholera epidemics and were given powers to control sewers, clean the streets, regulate environmenta ...

, which had been formed in 1864, established its offices in a market hall which was built in the High Street and completed in 1870. The market hall was a single storey structure with a small central tower with a

pyramid A pyramid (from el, πυραμίς ') is a structure whose outer surfaces are triangular and converge to a single step at the top, making the shape roughly a pyramid in the geometric sense. The base of a pyramid can be trilateral, quadrilat ...

-style roof. After the formation of Spennymoor Urban District Council in 1894, civic leaders decided to demolish the building and to erect a more substantial structure on the same site. Construction of the new building began in 1913. It was designed in the Edwardian Baroque style, was built in red brick with stone dressings at a cost of £18,000 and was completed in 1916. The design involved an asymmetrical main frontage with fifteen bays facing onto the High Street; the fifth bay from the left, which slightly projected forward and was faced in stone, featured a doorway on the ground floor with the town's

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 ...

in the tympanum, a tall window on the first floor and a

clock tower Clock towers are a specific type of structure which house a turret clock and have one or more clock faces on the upper exterior walls. Many clock towers are freestanding structures but they can also adjoin or be located on top of another buildi ...

with a

roof lantern A roof lantern is a daylighting architectural element. Architectural lanterns are part of a larger roof and provide natural light into the space or room below. In contemporary use it is an architectural skylight structure. A lantern roof wil ...

above. The other bays featured shops on the ground floor, baroque style windows on the first floor and pedimented baroque style windows at attic level. Internally, the principal room was the council chamber, which was panelled. The building continued to serve as a meeting place for Spennymoor Urban District Council for much of the 20th century but ceased to be the local seat of government after the enlarged Sedgefield District Council was formed in 1974. The town hall was refurbished in 1990 and continued to be used by Spennymoor Town Council as their meeting place. The Durham Miners Museum, which was formed when a group of former miners started exhibiting their collection of artefacts in 1999 and which had been based in a small room at Thornley Community Centre since 2005, relocated to more substantial facilities in the town hall in October 2011. A simulation of a typical mine tunnel, which could be explored by visitors, was put on display in the museum April 2014. With financial support from the Spennymoor Area Action Partnership, part of the first floor of the town hall was converted for use as an art gallery in 2011. The gallery was named the Bob Abley Art Gallery, in March 2014, after a former teacher and curator, Bob Abley, who helped establish the gallery. A room within the gallery was subsequently dedicated to exhibiting paintings by the locally-born artist and former miner,

Norman Cornish Norman Stansfield Cornish (18 November 1919 – 1 August 2014) was an English mining artist. Career Cornish was the last surviving member of the "Pitman's Academy" art school at the Spennymoor Settlement in County Durham in North East Engla ...

References

{{reflist Government buildings completed in 1916 City and town halls in County Durham Spennymoor