The Town Hall, Rochdale, Greater Manchester
A major restoration project has brought one of Britain’s greatest Victorian buildings back to splendour and life. Steven Brindle explains the extraordinary story of how it came to be
WE cannot have beauty without paying for it.’ So said George Leach Ashworth, the Mayor of Rochdale, at the opening of its new Town Hall on September 27, 1871. His words had a point, for the cost of the building had spiralled from an initial budget of £20,000 to the vast sum of £154,755. This had aroused great controversy, but the Mayor could claim in justification that the result was a masterpiece: Rochdale Town Hall is one of the most magnificent Victorian buildings in Britain. Now, its superb qualities may once again be appreciated fully, for the Town Hall has just emerged from a major renovation project at a cost of £20 million. In 2024—as in 1871 —the results amply justify the expense.
Today, the borough of Rochdale forms the north-eastern part of the metropolitan county of Greater Manchester. The landscape is undulating, rising to the moors to the north and east, and centred on the valley of the River Roch: hence the name. Rochdale originated as a large medieval parish embracing several hamlets, with the big church of St Chad at its heart. The area began to specialise in manufacturing woollen textiles and, when Celia Fiennes visited in about 1700, she found a ‘pretty, neat town, all built of stone’. Cotton manufacturing arrived in the 1790s and, by the 1840s, the cotton mills rivalled the woollen mills, but the town’s prosperity lay in the combination of the two. Rochdale was a Puritan town, with a radical, liberal tradition; it was also the birthplace of the Co-operative Movement in the 1840s.
Rochdale became a parliamentary borough in 1832, and was incor porated as a municipality in 1856; by then, its population numbered about 86,000. Plans for a town hall were mooted in 1858 and a site by the Roch was purchased in 1859. There matters rested for a while, as the council wrangled over the cost and other issues. George Leach Ashworth (1823 –73) was the pivotal figure in making it happen. His father had introduced the power loom to the neighbourhood, and the Ashworths owned cotton and woollen mills. However, in 1861, the American Civil War broke out: the Federal north blockaded the Confederacy, preventing cotton from the slave plantations from getting out. The resulting ‘Cotton Famine’ lasted for four years, closing businesses and causing great hardship in Lancashire. Ashworth stepped back from his family’s busines
