The Morris Hall with boundary wall and gate, Shrewsbury

The Morris Hall with boundary wall and gate, Shrewsbury

A public hall built in 1933 to designs by W J Harris.

The building is constructed with timber frame, brick infill, and sandstone rubble blocks, or solid brick, or brick with limestone dressings. The roof is covered in Broseley clay tile.

The structure comprises four adjoining elements in a roughly rectangular plan. At the northern end is a medieval-style hall, followed to the south by a narrower linking porch and lobby section, and southernmost is a Tudor-style block. Behind the linking section and southern block, to the west, sits a flat-roofed section.

The Northern Hall Block

The northernmost hall block is double-height under a pitched roof with moulded bargeboards to its north and south gable ends. It has timber-framed walls with brick infill on a base of sandstone rubble blocks. The bricks are 2 inches thick in keeping with the medieval style. Windows are tall with stone mullion and transoms and diamond leaded lights, varying from one to three mullions in width. The hall is arranged in three bays, with the east elevation featuring a window to each bay, the central window being the widest. The north elevation of the hall is solid except for a single-storey, double-windowed lean-to which accommodates the dais internally. The rear, west elevation is solid brick and is arranged in three bays; the central bay has a brick chimney breast which rises through the eaves and tapers to its top where there is a Tudor-style chimney pot. The side bays each have one window.

Openings throughout the building are under lintels made up of cemented layers of thin clay tiles.

The Lobby and Porch Section

The lobby section is single storey under a pitched roof with slopes to east and west. Its walls are timber-framed with brick infill. The porch projects east under a pitched roof with a gable featuring carved bargeboards. The door is coffered timber under an ogee-arch head, with tall, narrow, diamond-leaded margin lights flanking it. On either side of the porch, a pair of windows are set into the timber framing with leaded lights in a tessellating pattern of small squares and large octagons.

The Tudor-Style South Block

The south block is two storeys under two pitched roofs intersecting at right angles, with the larger roof to the north having gables to east and west, and the smaller a single gable to the south. The bricks here are 2 and 3/8 inches thick, in keeping with the Tudor style.

The front, east elevation is in two bays, the northern defined by the gable end of the larger roof. Windows have chamfered stone mullions with rectangular leaded lights featuring 'Y' tracery to the square heads. The northern bay has a five-light window to the ground floor and a three-light one above, with a smaller transom window in the south bay at first floor level. A timber plank door in an ashlar surround with a shallow gothic-arch-shaped head sits in the south bay. A drip mould separates the two floors, rising slightly over the five-light window, and the first floor three-light window has its own drip mould. The brick walls have ashlar quoins, and ashlar blocks to the kneelers of the north bay's gable. Central in the north gable is a diamond-shaped stone carved with Shrewsbury's town arms. The first floor of the north elevation is visible above the roof of the adjoining porch section where, to the east, is a single window in a stone surround, and to the west is a chimney stack with two ornately decorated Tudor-style pots. The chimney rises from behind a low parapet gable decorated with a diamond-shaped piece of sandstone carved with quartered royal arms.

The Rear Flat-Roofed Section

The rear flat-roofed section has elevations to the west and south. It is brick, two-storey construction, with standard-sized bricks. It accommodates the kitchen, cloakroom, toilets and stair hall at ground floor level, and part of the caretaker's flat above. Some windows are late twentieth-century replacements.

Interior

The entrance hall has five doorways giving access to adjacent rooms. From within the stair lobby, stairs lead to the first floors of the south block and flat-roofed section, originally the caretaker's flat, now used as an office room and privately rented flat.

Flooring is largely woodblock, though the stair lobby has floorboards, the porch has brick and tile laid in geometric patterns, and the cloakroom, kitchen and toilets have terrazzo. The toilets retain their original wall tiling.

The interior is richly decorated with walls plastered in an uneven finish. Decorative joinery is extensive in medieval and Tudor styles, including mouldings with leaf and grapevine motifs, wood panelling to the lower parts of the walls, and carved doors and architraves. The entrance lobby ceiling features a roof lantern. The main hall has a ribbed and barrel-vaulted ceiling and a fireplace in the west wall with a fireback bearing a lion motif dated 1649. Over the fireplace is the memorial to J K Morris by the Bromsgrove Guild, supplied at a cost of £110 in 1936, inscribed with a quote from William Morris. The north end of the hall has a raised dais with three steps up on the left-hand side. The south wall of the S G Lake room displays a plaque to the memory of Lake.

Boundary Wall and Gate

The boundary wall to the east is constructed of red sandstone blocks with square chamfered limestone caps to the gateposts for the simple iron gate. The gateposts each support a lantern. Through the gate, stone steps lead upwards, flanked by a red sandstone wall with occasional capped posts. At the top of the steps the flanking walls extend north and south.