Blue Plaque stories

Peterborough Civic Society has installed 20 blue plaques around the city commemorating famous people and places. The society explains the stories behind the plaques 16. Town Hall

This plaque is located on the back wall of the portico to the Town Hall’s main entrance in Bridge Street.

The preparations for, and building of, the Town Hall between 1929 and 1933 brought about the most drastic and irreversible transformation of the city’s hitherto small town character.

The distance between building lines in Bridge Street was doubled – the whole of the eastern side being demolished. The new Town Hall was built to the designs of architect E. Berry Webber, while the builder (initially at least) was the great Peterborough master-builder John Thompson and Sons.

Having successfully obtained its Charter of Incorporation in 1874 (see plaque No 2) the new City Corporation had to make content for the best part of sixty years with meeting upstairs in The Chamber over the Cross (i.e. Butter Cross) - which then became known as the Guildhall. But in 1928, an architectural competition was launched for a new Town Hall.

The Architect’s Journal was, at best, ambivalent about the colonnades, thinking it is perhaps an idea worth following up, but adding sceptically “... if he succeeds, the ghost of John Nash will follow him with sweet dreams of ghostly approbation (shades of Nash’s ill-fated Regent Street colonnades) and he will be among the few men who have added a colonnade to a shopping front and kept it there for a longer period than was needed for the shopkeepers to find words in which to vent their anger at such an imposition”.

The foundation stone was laid in June 1929 and the Town Hall was officially opened with due civic pomp and flummery in October 1933, following what the technical press referred to archly as “some incidental delay’’. This anodyne phrase glossed over the fact that the main contractor – the great local firm of masterbuilders John Thompson and Sons, (see plaque No. 06) - had been forced into voluntary liquidation mid-way through the contract.

The Town Hall’s noble Corinthian columnedportico, surmounted by a handsome lantern and cupola above its pediment, closes the vista looking east along the length of Priestgate. Down to 1974 the Town Hall was shared between Peterborough City Council and the Soke of Peterborough County Council. Subsequently it has been used predominantly by Peterborough CityCouncil; though that is soon to change.

This plaque is the sixteenth in a series of twenty blue plaques recently installed in the city centre by Peterborough Civic Society. Further details about all the plaques can be found in the accompanying leaflet available at the Visitor Information Centre ore in Bridge Street or via the society’s website.