Town Hall

This distinguished civic building stands on the north side of Water Street. It was built between 1749 and 1754 by John Wood the Elder, then significantly modified, extended and reconstructed from the late 18th century to the early 19th century by John Foster Senior, supervised by James Wyatt. The dome was completed in 1802, the south portico in 1811, and the interior around 1820. In 1899-1900, Thomas Shelmerdine extended the council chamber and rebuilt the north portico using the original columns. The building is constructed of stone with a slate roof and lead dome.

Exterior

The Town Hall presents two storeys over nine bays on its main facades, with twelve-bay returns. The basement is of rock-faced rustication. The ground floor features rusticated stonework with round-headed windows set in recessed reveals. All windows are sashed with glazing bars.

The south facade centres on a three-bay loggia with round-arched entrances. Windows in the returns have wrought iron screens. The recessed door has a fanlight and three-panel doors fitted with large ornamental knockers. The first floor displays unfluted Corinthian pilasters and a central hexastyle pedimented portico with unfluted Corinthian columns. The windows are round-headed and set on angle pilasters. Above these are rectangular panels carved with swags and garlands, probably by Frederick Legé, which replaced attic windows in 1811. An entablature and balustrade crown the composition. Between the capitals of the pilasters are panels carved in high relief with exotic emblems of Liverpool's mercantile trade, including African and Indian heads, an elephant, a crocodile and a camel. These panels continue onto the east and west elevations. The carvers of those on the 1749-54 south and east facades may have been Thomas Johnson, William Mercer and Edward Rigby.

The east facade presents its first nine bays as a symmetrical composition around a three-bay centre with an applied hexastyle portico. The central door has an iron overthrow and lamp. The last three bays, part of Wyatt's northern extension, feature first floor niches and blind bull's eyes beneath garlands. Here the pilasters are coupled. A tall parapet rises over the entablature, with coupled pilasters separating panels decorated with swags, continuing to the north facade.

The north facade spans five bays with a projecting three-bay centre containing a first floor open loggia of coupled columns. The centre windows have architraves and pediments, with bull's eyes above. Side windows are tripartite, with colonnettes and responds, and carved panels above. The loggia is surmounted by statues ordered from Richard Westmacott Senior in 1792. A tall parapet caps the entablature.

The west facade resembles the east facade. The central dome rises from a drum with large recessed small-paned windows behind a colonnade featuring four projecting Corinthian aedicules. A balustrade supports four clocks flanked by lions and unicorns. The dome is surmounted by a Coade-stone seated figure, either Britannia or Minerva, by J. C. Rossi. The statue's base is decorated with shells.

Interior

The main entrance leads to the Vestibule, which is panelled and features brass plaques naming those given the honorary freedom of the City. The groin vaulted ceiling has four shallow lunettes containing murals by J. H. Amschwitz. An ornate fireplace made from 17th-century Flemish carvings was presented in 1893. The floor is laid with colourful encaustic tiles from 1848, incorporating the arms of Liverpool. Rooms lie to east and west.

In the northern extension is the Council Chamber, enlarged in 1899-1900 to fill the ground floor. It has panelled walls. Between the Council Chamber and the Staircase Hall is the Hall of Remembrance, opened in 1921. Its walls carry the names of over 13,000 Liverpool men who died during the First World War, and the lunettes are painted by Frank O. Salisbury.

In the Staircase Hall stand two very unusual cast-iron stoves in the form of Doric columns, possibly designed by Joseph Gandy. The staircase rises under the coffered interior of the dome: a single broad flight between two pairs of Corinthian columns ascends to a half-landing, then two narrower flights, not attached to the walls, return towards the upper landing. The upper landing runs round three sides. The drum of the dome rests on pendentives painted by Charles Wellington Furse and installed in 1902, showing powerful scenes of dock labour.

On the first floor are three reception rooms across the south front, designed by Wyatt. The Central Reception Room has Neoclassical plasterwork by Francesco Bernasconi, who was responsible for most of the stuccowork throughout. To the west and east are rooms with segmental tunnel vaults. Along the west side is the Dining Room, with a coved ceiling and elaborate plasterwork. Corinthian pilasters of yellow Carniola marble stand with painted roundels between the capitals. At either end of the room are niches containing mahogany cabinets for warming plates, supporting candelabra in the form of red scagliola vases by Joseph Brown from 1813. Between the windows are stoves of remarkable Neoclassical design.

Along the east side is the Small Ballroom, which is segmental vaulted with pilasters of Red Carniola. Along the north side is the Large Ballroom, also with a segmental-vaulted ceiling. This room has stucco by James Queen, pilasters of yellow Carniola, and white marble chimneypieces by William Hetherington. In the centre of the south side is a balconied niche with a coffered semi-dome for the musicians.

In the basement are the kitchens, and on the west side there is a brick-vaulted ice house.

The building retains 19th-century iron area railings incorporating Greek Revival lamp standards by William Bennett of Liverpool.

History and Context

The present Town Hall, one of the finest surviving town halls of the 18th century, replaced a building of 1673 which stood a little to the south. That earlier structure was raised above an arcade which provided space for merchants to conduct their business, or exchange. By the 1740s Liverpool's trade had burgeoned to such an extent that a new town hall was decided upon, both to accommodate the needs of its merchants and as a demonstration of their prosperity.

The architect chosen was John Wood of Bath, who had recently, in 1743, completed the grand Exchange at Bristol. Bristol's pre-eminence as a slave port was then challenged only by London, but Liverpool was catching up, and it was thought that Wood's talents and reputation would admirably reflect the town's growing status. In 1749 Wood's plans were approved, and in 1754 the Exchange, as it then was, opened.

Wood's new building differed considerably from the Town Hall as it stands today. It originally had only the south and east facades, with older buildings abutting the west and north sides. At the centre of the building was the Exchange courtyard, surrounded by covered walkways with colonnades. According to contemporary descriptions this was dark and confined, and merchants preferred to transact business in the street outside. A grand stair rose from the east walk to the first floor, where the principal rooms included the Town Hall in the south range.

In 1785 it was resolved that the buildings adjoining the Exchange should be removed. In 1792 John Foster Senior of Liverpool prepared a new design for the exposed west facade, similar to the existing east front, which was adopted. When it was decided to build a large northern extension for the mayor's office and court, with a new assembly room above, the London architect James Wyatt was consulted. Wyatt's designs for a new northern block and a new dome to replace the earlier square dome were accepted, and thereafter Foster supervised the building work, answering to Wyatt.

In January 1795 Wood's building was gutted by fire, although the unfinished northern extension remained untouched. The Council decided to rebuild within the walls, the Exchange courtyard being dispensed with—a new Exchange was built to the north of the Town Hall, around Exchange Flags—and Wyatt's internal scheme remains, modified and embellished during the succeeding years. The south portico of 1811 announced the building's political function, the space beneath being intended for election hustings. Feasting was provided for by the kitchens which have been in the basement since the 1820s and remain to this day. Most of the superb furniture in the first-floor reception rooms was made for the Town Hall around 1817 to 1820. These rooms have been described as "probably the grandest such suite of civic rooms in the country, an outstanding and complete example of late Georgian decoration and a powerful demonstration of the wealth of Liverpool at the opening of the nineteenth century."

Liverpool's maritime business was initially based on trade with Ireland, but during the latter years of the 17th century the town's interests reached North America and the West Indies, as well as Madeira and the Canary Islands. Liverpool was well placed for the Atlantic trade, and as well as being an important centre for shipbuilding, Liverpool and its environs produced many goods for export, such as textiles, glass and metalware. From the 1690s onwards, Liverpool's prosperity was increasingly due to its investment in the slave trade. The first recorded slave ship to leave Liverpool was the Liverpool Merchant, which in 1700 carried 220 slaves to Barbados. Liverpool's merchants specialised in direct trade with the Spanish empire, selling slaves particularly in Havana and Cartagena de Indias, and were adventurous in scouring the west coast of Africa for new sources of slaves. During the 1750s Liverpool became Britain's leading slave port and retained its position until 1807. Overall, Liverpool ships transported half of the three million Africans carried across the Atlantic by British slavers.

Liverpool's mayors were chosen from the most successful of her citizens, so it is not surprising to find that many of those who presided over the new Town Hall were associated with the slave trade. It is said that 20 mayors of Liverpool were directly involved in the trade. Of those who held office after the building of the new Town Hall, notable examples include William Gregson, mayor in 1762, and Thomas Staniforth, mayor in 1798—both men were slave traders and bankers—and the Earle brothers, Ralph and Thomas, members of a family whose wealth from slave ships, plantations, and the products of those plantations gave them influence in Liverpool over several generations. Both Ralph, mayor in 1769, and Thomas, mayor in 1787, traded in the beads which were amongst the commodities used to buy slaves on the African coast. Jonas Bold, a slave trader, sugar merchant and banker, became mayor in 1802; his family's importance in Liverpool outlived the slave trade.

The external decoration of Wood's Exchange building proudly celebrates the source of much of Liverpool's wealth, in luxuriant carved panels representing Liverpool's international trade. These were described by a late 18th-century observer as "Busts of Blackamoors & Elephants with the Teeth of the Latter, with such like emblematical Figures, representing the African Trade & Commerce." The carvings are very similar to those produced for Wood's Bristol Exchange. In Liverpool, the frieze displays the heads of an African and an American Indian, both with feathered head-dresses, together with outlandish animals, lavishly framed with exotic fruits and flowers, and barrels. By the time the west elevation was built around 1792, the slave trade was increasingly a subject of controversy in Liverpool. The Reverend William Bagshaw declared in 1787 that "throughout this large-built Town every Brick is cemented to its fellow Brick by the blood and sweat of Negroes." Though the new carvings continued the theme of maritime commerce—with marine horses and cornucopias, packages, ropes and anchors—no direct reference to Africa is made.

Fortunes had been made by Liverpool merchants in business related to the slave trade, but greater prosperity was to come in the years following its abolition. The foundations of Liverpool's position as Britain's prime Atlantic port had been laid during its years as a slave port, and Liverpool continued to develop many of the trading connections that had been established by the slave trade, in America and Africa. Liverpool imported the cotton for the Lancashire mills, most of it produced, until the American Civil War and subsequent Emancipation, by slaves in the American South. In the 1840s steamships began regular liner services, carrying passengers and cargo from Liverpool to America. As had been predicted by William Roscoe, Liverpool made more money taking willing passengers to America than she had done taking slaves there by force. In 1851 Queen Victoria stood on the north balcony of the Town Hall to greet the merchants assembled in Exchange Flags. She remarked that she had never before seen together so large a number of well-dressed gentlemen.

Liverpool Town Hall stands at the centre of the mercantile district built during the 19th and early 20th centuries. The area displays the city's tremendous wealth in a dramatic variety of major commercial buildings. In the immediate vicinity of the Town Hall are the buildings of the Liverpool & London Insurance Company of 1856-8, the Queen Insurance Buildings of around 1837-8, originally for the Royal Bank, the Bank of England of 1845-6, the India Buildings completed in 1930, and Martins Bank of 1927-32. All of these are listed. Exchange Flags, in front of the Town Hall's north facade, was the commercial heart of Liverpool. The present Exchange Buildings of 1939-55 are on the site of two earlier Exchanges: the first of 1803-8 by Foster, possibly with Wyatt; the second of 1864-7 by T. H. Wyatt. At the centre of Exchange Flags stands the Nelson Monument of 1813 by Matthew Cotes Wyatt, James Wyatt's son, and Richard Westmacott Senior, a listed bronze sculpture of a strikingly maritime flavour.

The story of Liverpool's progress as a trading power stretches back beyond 1207, when the town was granted its first charter—the 700th anniversary of this event was celebrated by the murals painted for the Town Hall Vestibule in the early 20th century. The year 2007, which marked the bicentenary of the abolition of the slave trade and a significant moment in the city's mercantile history, was therefore doubly significant for Liverpool.