Inverness Town House
Municipal building in Inverness, Scotland From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Municipal building in Inverness, Scotland From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Inverness Town House is a municipal building in the High Street, Inverness, Scotland. The town hall, which was the headquarters of Inverness Town Council and now serves as a local office of the Highland Council, is a Category A listed building.[1]
Inverness Town House | |
---|---|
Location | High Street, Inverness |
Coordinates | 57.4773°N 4.2250°W |
Built | 1882 |
Architect | William Lawrie |
Architectural style(s) | Gothic style |
Listed Building – Category A | |
Official name | High Street, Town House |
Designated | 21 May 1971 |
Reference no. | LB35260 |
The first municipal building in the town was the Inverness Tolbooth which dated back to at least 1593. After a new stone bridge was built across the River Ness in 1685, civic officials were accommodated in the East Gatehouse to the bridge.[2]
A town house, intended to accommodate meetings of the burgh council, was built at the corner of Castle Wynd and the High Street.[2] Erected on a site previously occupied by a private residence of Lord Lovat, it was completed in 1708 and subsequently enlarged in 1750.[3] After Duncan Grant of Bught House died in 1873, leaving £5,000 towards the cost of a new town house, civic leaders decided to use the legacy to demolish the old town house and to construct a new building on the same site.[4] Much of the design work had been undertaken by 1876.[5]
The foundation stone for the new building was laid by the provost, Alexander Simpson, on 15 April 1878.[6] It was designed by William Lawrie in the Gothic style, built with ashlar stone at a cost of £13,500 and was officially opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 19 January 1882.[7] A carved burgh coat of arms which had originally been used to decorate a bridge across the River Ness that had been completed in 1685,[8] was rescued when the bridge was swept away in a flood in January 1849 and embedded in the west elevation of the new town house.[3]
The design was modelled on The McManus, an art gallery and museum in Dundee which had been designed by George Gilbert Scott and completed in 1867.[4] It involved a symmetrical main frontage with seven bays facing onto the High Street; the middle bay featured an arched doorway with a gablet roof on the ground floor, a mullioned window with the town's coat of arms carved into a panel on the first floor and a mullioned window in the attic all flanked by tourelles.[1] The outer bays contained trefoil headed mullioned windows on the ground floor, mullion windows with tracery on the first floor and bartizans at the building corners.[1] Internally, the principal rooms were the main hall, the council chamber and the committee room.[4] The entrance vestibule leading to the staircase was lit by stained glass designed and manufactured by Adam & Small.[1][9]
The council chamber was remodelled to a design by John Hinton Gall in 1894 and stained glass windows, designed by J. H. Stewart, were installed by William Meikle & Sons to celebrate Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee in 1898.[3] The building was extended to the rear to a design by James Robert Rhind in 1907.[3]
The building was the venue for the first British Cabinet meeting to be held outside London on 7 September 1921, when David Lloyd George, interrupted his holiday in Gairloch to call an emergency meeting to discuss the situation in Ireland: the Inverness Formula, which was developed at the meeting, formed the basis of the Anglo-Irish Treaty.[4] King George V also attended the cabinet meeting in 1921 but then returned to the town house in 1929 to be presented with the freedom of the City of Inverness.[3]
Inverness Town Council was replaced by the larger Inverness District Council in 1975, one of the lower-tier districts within the Highland region. The district council used the town house as its headquarters.[10][11] Inverness District Council was in turn abolished in 1996 when the Highland region was redesignated as a single-tier council area. Highland Council continues to use the town house as one of its secondary offices and customer service points.[12]
A two-year programme of refurbishment works to the main frontage of the building was carried out by Laing Traditional Masonry at a cost of £3.9 million based on a design by LDN Architects and completed in February 2018.[13][14] The work, which included the replacement of two stone heraldic dogs,[15] was commended in the UK Natural Stone Awards for 2018.[16]
Works of art in the town house include a portrait by Allan Ramsay of the former Lord Mayor of London, Sir John Barnard,[17] a portrait by Henry Raeburn of the former Provost of Inverness, Sir John Mackintosh of Aberarder[18] and a 16th-century painting by an unknown Italian artist depicting the Holy Family with Saint John the Baptist.[19]
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