Yeadon Town Hall

Yeadon Town Hall is a building dating from 1879-80, designed by William Hill of Leeds. Constructed of coursed dressed sandstone with slate roofs, it is a large rectangular building with an entrance block at the north end. The building is of group value, reflecting its importance to the local community.

The entrance block is in a 15th-century French Gothic style and is symmetrical, featuring a prominent two-stage clock tower that rises through a steeply pitched two-span roof. A large, two-centred arched doorway is moulded in four orders with shafts that have foliated capitals. It contains panelled double doors, a hoodmould with figured stops, and a pitched crocketed moulding that extends into the first stage of the tower. The tower itself has a moulded corbel, originally intended for a statue (now missing), and around it are lancet windows with round-headed lights and circular plate-traceried heads, linked by a sill-band. A dripmould adorns the second stage, which has recessed two-centred arched windows with shafts, plate tracery creating three small lights, and an integral circular clock face. The tower’s cornice has a moulded detail, and a steeply pitched, swept saddle-back roof with louvred lucarnes.

Flanking the doorway on either side are three two-centred arched windows on the ground floor, with shafts, impost bands, and linked hoodmoulds with carved stops. The first floor has a single, tall, shafted, plate-traceried two-light window that rises into a dormer with a brattished cornice and a steeply pitched hipped and swept roof with an apex finial. The first floor also incorporates four roundels containing busts representing the arts and sciences, and a hollow-moulded cornice with gargoyle rainwater heads. Return walls have similar dormers. To the rear of the entrance block is a tall, canted bay with tall stairwindows, and the higher roof ridge has a chimney on each side of the tower.

The main range, behind the entrance block, houses offices on the ground floor and an assembly hall on the first floor, featuring tall transomed three-light windows and dormers.

The interior is generally less ornate; however, the assembly hall has a stage at the south end and a shallow gallery around the remaining three sides.