Town Hall And Guildhall

The building is a town hall and Guildhall, incorporating a 17th-century Guildhall with 18th-century alterations and a 1851 town hall front range designed by P.C. Hardwick. It is constructed of coursed sandstone with ashlar dressings and has a roof of graduated Lakeland slate. The architecture is in the Perpendicular style. The building is two storeys and has attics, with a four-bay arrangement.

The three-bay Guildhall on the left has three Tudor-arched doorways with chamfered surrounds. Paired windows flank the central doorway which is above carved panels dated 1850. Large stone brackets support a first-floor balcony overlooking a high, wide central three-light window and tall flanking two-light windows with tracery. There are drip moulds and relieving arches above the windows. A spherical-triangular attic window is within a coped gable, with battlemented coping over the side bays and tall end buttresses.

Six wide steps lead to a set-back entrance to the town hall, featuring a two-centred arch with a head-stopped drip mould and a canopied niche. Double doors have linen-fold panelling. Two-light windows flank the niche, and a three-light window sits above, with stone mullions and a transom to the top window, and Tudor-headed lights. A steeply-pitched roof has a tall crocketed spirelet over a ridge ventilator and paired coped ashlar polygonal chimneys.

The interior of the Guildhall, built in 1665, has high wood panelling on the west wall with plaster above. It features a renewed arch-braced three-bay roof with shafted wood corbels. The arms of William and Mary are above the panelling. The adjoining Mayor's Chamber has 1752 panelling, two-panelled doors and a 20th-century coved ceiling, a Jacobean chimney piece and overmantel transferred from the former Red Lion Inn, now part of Hatfield College. North Bailey displays figures in contemporary dress of a gentleman, king and soldier. The town hall, at the west, above a covered market, has panelled walls with commemorative painted panels, a hammer-beam roof with carved decoration, a high stone-hooded chimney piece and linen-fold panelled double doors. The entrance hall contains a medieval head-carved stone corbel, possibly a remnant of the 1356 Guildhall that previously occupied the site.