Sheffield Old Town Hall history mirrored changes in city

Sheffield’s town halls were always too small for the functions they housed. The town repeatedly tried to squeeze a quart into a pint pot in providing for essential functions like local government, the courts and the police.
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The town repeatedly tried to squeeze a quart into a pint pot in providing for essential functions like local government, the courts and the police.

Before 1808 the town hall, built in 1700, was in the corner of the parish churchyard, near the top of what’s now East Parade.

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It had a poor reputation; the three dark cells underneath the courtroom were only eight foot square and six foot high and each had an ‘offensive sewer’ in the corner. The courtrooms were directly above – and, apart from the stench, this building was too small by the 1800.

Sheffield's Old Town Hall on WaingateSheffield's Old Town Hall on Waingate
Sheffield's Old Town Hall on Waingate

In 1800 local government fell mainly to the Town Trust, a self-perpetuating body of prominent men. Faced with complaints, they donated money and a site on the corner of Castle Street and Waingate for a new hall, which opened around 1808.

This wasn’t very big, but rapidly became Sheffield’s civic centre. The Town Trust moved in – its funding was contingent on their being accommodated, permanently, in the new building.

The magistrates were happier there. In 1818 Sheffield gained an Improvement Commission, which took over control of policing (such as it was), lighting and street cleansing from the Trust. That squeezed in too.

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By 1833 the overcrowding was so bad that the Town Trust stumped up for extensions. Now there was a police watch house, offices for the Commissioners, court rooms – the Sessions Hall, used for public meetings as well as trials, was said to be ‘one of the largest in the county’.

Cells at Sheffield Old Town HallCells at Sheffield Old Town Hall
Cells at Sheffield Old Town Hall

Underneath were cells for the temporary confinement of prisoners who served their sentences in Wakefield (Sheffield never had a prison).

Yet again it wasn’t enough. An 1862 guidebook remarked that the building had ‘grown perfectly inadequate....the offices for the Chief Constable.., etc, are ... inconvenient....with the utmost difficulty ... the necessary business can be carried on .....the cells are the worst of all.... mostly underground, and most unhealthy’. So in 1865 yet more extensions went up with more court space, and the police got their own building in Castle Green.

The Town Council, which came into being in 1843, was always last in the queue for space and had long rented rooms elsewhere; the Council Chamber was for years in the Assembly Rooms in Norfolk Street and later in the Free Library in Surrey Street.

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The 1860s extensions didn’t help for very long. As Mary Walton waspishly commented in her history of Sheffield, it was all beyond a joke.

The Council, she conceded, didn’t spend on comfort; their offices were rooms in ‘the worst parts of town’; they rented the Town Hall for the administration of justice in spite of the overcrowding; ‘hagglings about the provision of a council chamber continued until the end of the century.......they used odd rooms in the Town Hall, the Assembly Rooms and the Cutlers’ Hall until 1857, when they inflicted themselves on the very unwilling Free Library, which was overcrowded from the very start’.

Then something changed. The town wanted to become a city; it got its charter in 1893 and finally in 1893-6 built a Town Hall worthy of a city, the present building in Pinstone Street. The Council left the Waingate Hall for good.

But why this saga over decades of failure to provide enough space? The two main reasons were linked: huge population growth and the inexorable extension of local government.

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Sheffield’s population grew from 61,000 in 1801 to 450,000 in 1901. More people meant more crime, more demands on courts and policing, more civil litigation.

Local government expanded into new areas, like public health and housing, all needing officials and offices. But there was something in the town’s culture too, that was perhaps reluctant to spend on what some saw as unneeded civic show.

Pinstone Street didn’t end the saga. The Old Town Hall was extended again in 1896, to add a huge courtroom and new cells beneath, and 1955.

Only 20 years on, it was too small to house both magistrates’ and Crown courts; a new, Brutalist magistrates’ court was built in Bridge Street in the 1970s, leaving the Old TH as Crown Courts only, until their move to West Bar at the end of 1995.

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Interestingly, West Bar has 12 courtrooms, the Old TH in final form had only 5! As for the council – the new Town Hall was extended in 1923; the Egg Box extension, now demolished, went up in the 1960s. Now it occupies the enormous Moorfoot building and Howden House as well!

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