Town Hall, St Leonard's Place, Kinghorn

The Town Hall, located on St Leonard’s Place in Kinghorn, was designed by Thomas Hamilton and built between 1826 and 1830. It is a substantial three-storey building with a single-storey recessed wing, built as a combination of a town house, prison, and tower. The front (SE) and northeast faces are constructed from cleaned sandstone ashlar, while the southwest and northwest faces utilise narrower bands of squared rubble. The building features a base course, string course, and a corbelled cornice below a coped parapet. Decorative details include angle turrets, corbels, hoodmoulds, label stops, stone transoms and mullions, and moulded arrises.

The principal (SE) elevation is symmetrical, dominated by a two-stage tower in the centre, which rises above the flanking bays. Steps lead to the slightly advanced central bay, which houses a two-leaf panelled and studded timber door. Above the door is a tall six-light transomed window. On the first floor is a smaller corbelled panel displaying a damaged clock face, flanked by blind oculi and an over-arching hoodmould. The flanking bays each have a small window on the ground floor and a tall four-light transomed window on the first floor, surmounted by a corbelled parapet with small turrets at the outer angles.

The northeast elevation has a full-width, gabled, single-storey wing with a small window in the centre below a blocking course, and another window in the stone cross-finialled gablehead. Polygonal buttresses transition to small turrets at the outer angles. Further windows are visible on the return to the left, with the right return adjoining a boundary wall. There are two windows on the recessed face at the first floor, and three polygonal wallhead stacks group in the centre above.

The southwest elevation displays a small window on the ground floor to the left of centre, a tall bipartite window on the first floor to the right, and a stair window to the left. A grouped stack, like those on the northeast elevation, is situated centrally.

The northwest elevation has a ground floor door to the outer left, below a small window at both the first and second floors. A glazed oculus is positioned to the left of centre, also at the first and second floors. Small corbelled turrets mark the outer angles. All windows were blocked in 1999, but the upper lights of the transomed windows retain multi-pane leaded glazing. The roof is slate, with coped ashlar stacks featuring clay cans and ashlar-coped skews.

The interior includes three vaulted ground floor cells, accessible by a turnpike stair leading from a guard-room to a chamber above. The first floor contains a council chamber and court-room, retaining four-centred arch marble fireplaces with stop-chamfered jambs on the northeast and southwest sides, a mutule and foliate cornice, a decorative cast-iron air vent, panelled timber shutters and architraves, and a dog-leg staircase with decorative cast-iron balusters and timber handrail.

Low flat-coped boundary walls with polygonal piers and some decorative cast-iron railings and arch are present on the southeast side. A rear exercise yard is enclosed by a high, flat-coped, dressed ashlar boundary wall to the northeast, featuring blind gunloops and ogee-headed arches; the former features a crenellated parapet and flanking piers, and a turreted polygonal buttress to the outer left. A high rubble wall defines the western boundary.