Lowestoft Town Hall

Produced to assist with the building’s regeneration and future uses

1. The Lowestoft community relocated itself (onto what is now the High Street area of a much expanded town) from what was probably its original location about a mile to the south-west, in an area now occupied by a large municipal cemetery between Normanston Drive and Rotterdam Road.

2. The move took place during the first half of the 14th century (no pottery fragments earlier than c. 1300 having been found in High Street excavations or in those along the face of the cliff) and probably resulted from a combination of contributing factors.

3. Sea-related activity was increasing at the time (both fishing and maritime trade) and the centre of population needed to be nearer to the beach to operate more effectively, while a growing population required increased living-space and couldn’t achieve this in situwithout encroaching onto valuable agricultural land. Rising sea levels at the time were also probably making an area of semi-marshland to the south of the township more liable to periodic flooding, while the grant of a weekly market and annual fair in 1308 may well have required more a favourable location to ensure success.

4. With the agreement of its non-resident manorial lord, John de Dreux, Earl of Richmond (nephew of Edward I), a new township started up on a piece of cliff-top heathland, or waste, previously used for the rough grazing of livestock and the cutting of gorse and bracken. The rents for these privileges would have been small, and to convert the land to building-use produced a larger income – both from original sale of the land (probably to villein tenants of the manor) and, thereafter, from an annual lord’s rent charged on every customary-held property constructed, together with an entry fine paid by a new occupant every time it changed hands.

5. Before any building could take place, the cliff-face had to be terraced from end to end to make it usable – a remarkable community effort, which must have taken some considerable time to complete. Thus, the Lowestoft High Street, as it is seen today – and even though much altered – is in fact a planned late medieval town, with a sinuous main roadway running north to south (with substantial messuages on either side) and an area of cross-lanes to the west of it with much smaller plots and dwellings. There are five such through-ways: Mariner’s Street, Compass Street, Crown Street East, Wesleyan Chapel Lane and Duke’s Head Street.

6. The new town was probably up and running by about the time that the Black Death struck during  1348-9 and one of the key buildings was the Town Chapel, which stood on the site of the present-day Town Hall. Its primary function was to act as a chapel-of-ease for the local priest and townspeople during the winter months particularly, when the tracks and footpaths from the town to St. Margaret’s parish church were often difficult to negotiate. Mass would probably have been celebrated there, daily, in inclement conditions – though with the congregation as observers only – and baptisms and marriages also conducted. Funeral services may also have been held, but the burials would had to have taken place in the parish church’s graveyard – half to three-quarters of a mile away, to the west. It is perhaps significant that Compass Street, immediately to the south of the Town Hall, was originally called Bier Lane, this showing that it was part of the route along which the mortal remains of the town’s departed were carried.

8. Nothing is known of what the original Town Chapel looked like, but it shared its location with the town’s Corn Cross. The main market-place for traded goods and livestock was on the south-western edge of the built-up area, where it remains to this day (largely used for car-parking), but it had a specialist area for the sale and purchase of grain further to the north. Again, we don’t know whether the Corn Cross was just that: a raised, stone cross on a plinth – or whether it was some kind of building, with a room accessed by exterior stairs set above an arcaded trading-area beneath. Again, significantly, the original name of Mariner’s Score (just to the north of the Town Hall and on the opposite side of the High Street) was Cross Score, with reference made regarding its proximity to where trading in grain took place.

9. At some point, after the English Reformation (and even, perhaps, before it) the Town Chapel fell into disrepair. From a description given in Edmund Gillingwater’s An Historical Account of the Ancient Town of Lowestoft (1790), p. 332, it might have been a composite building combining religious and commercial functions, as reference is made to its being raised on arches – which suggests something resembling a market hall.

10. In the year 1570, the townsfolk applied to John Parkhurst, Bishop of Norwich, for the building to be used again as a chapel-of-ease. Permission was granted, subject to suitable refurbishment, and with the proviso that neither of the sacraments of Baptism or Holy Communion was to be celebrated there. It seems to have been the rearward part of the building which was used, with the section fronting the street serving other purposes.

11. One of these was to act as a venue for the handing-out of charitable gifts to the poor people of the town, on the donor’s funeral-day (the other one being the parish church itself). A particularly interesting example is the legacy of Edward Sparrow, yeoman-farmer and owner of The Spreadeagle inn (situated on the site of the former canopied Triangle Market area) who, in his will of 26 August 1609, left the sum of £5 to be disbursed on the day of his funeral (7 September 1609) in the following way: £3 in cash handouts and £2 on three barrels of beer and 240 penny-loaves. He obviously wished to be remembered in the best of all ways!

12. The Manor Roll of 1618 (Suffolk Archives, 194/A10/73), which records every building, piece of land and field in the parish, describes the building thus: villat de laistofte ten unu Tenentu voc le tonne [sic] howse cum Gardino adiacen iacen px vsus Austr Et Abbutt sicut ult vsus Orient et Cont [  ] red [  ]. This translates as “the town of Lowestoft holds one tenement called the tonne [town] house, with adjoining Garden, situated South of the previous holding and Abutting in the same way to the East. Area [  ]. Rent [  ]”. The previous holding referred to was a house and garden belonging to Richard Bury. No annual lord’s rent is given in connection with the Town House because none was levied on it. The ground-area size occupied by properties is mainly given in the Roll for fields only.

13. For some time, and reflecting its lack of use as a place of worship, the building had become known by the alternative name of  Town House, or Town Chamber – with an upper room in it, facing the High Street, used for public business of various kinds. In 1674, part of it was taken in to accommodate the town’s free grammar school – the original building of 1570, abutting onto the eastern wall of the churchyard having fallen into serious disrepair. It must have been much more convenient for the master and his forty boys to take on basic literacy and numeracy and the rudiments of the Latin tongue smack in the middle of town.

14. However, it was a case of the grammar school moving from one decaying building into another, as the Town Chamber/Chapelwas once more in need of major restoration – and this time it was a case of demolition and rebuilding. A local subscription-list was launched among the local citizenry, towards the end of the 17th century, and the amount raised came to £693 8s 23/4d [£693.41] according to published accounts of 7 June 1698 (see Gillingwater, pp. 334-5).

15. This building remained in use until well into the 19th century, though with regular maintenance work on it carried out. A good ink-and-wash drawing of it, by local artist Richard Powles (dating from 1784) is to be found in the Isaac Gillingwater collection of illustrations (Suffolk Archives, 193/2/1) and shows clearly how the composite structure was organised. This study features on p. 21 of my book, Lowestoft 1550-1750: Development and Change in a Suffolk Coastal Town.

16. The chapel section was set at a right-angle to the two-storey part fronting the street and stood in the same plane as the latter’s gabled northern elevation. It ran along the so-called Swan Lane (formerly West Lane, or Mendham Lane), which is the Mariners Street of today, and it had no fenestration on the ground-floor level. Four windows set along its length, just below the roof-line, formed a type of clerestory (presumably replicated on the south side) and there was a single, larger window and entry-door in its western wall.

17. The Town Chamber frontage onto the High Street was much more decorative, with the first-floor schoolroom and meeting-place having four large windows with decorative cornice above and rusticated stone quoining on the northern and southern angles of the walls. A chimney-stack in the northern gable shows that the space was heated and there was a decorative hexagonal cupola rising from the roof at its junction with that of the chapel, complete with louvres in each angled face and a weathercock surmounting the whole. A gabled dormer protruded from the cupola, giving access to a pedimented clock set on a protruding timber and braced to the wall by an angled iron bar.

18. Below this bold and eye-catching civic statement, the ground-floor housed the long-established corn-trading facility, with solid exterior walls to north and south and the east wall of the Chapel to the west. It was accessed directly from the street through three large arcaded doors, which folded inwards during the hours of business and were then drawn into place to close the area off when it was not in use.

19. A listing of copyhold properties in the town (c. 85% of the town’s houses and outbuildings), compiled during the 1720s by the Vicar of the time, John Tanner (Suffolk Archives, 454/1), describes the building as The Chapel or Town House and shows that it had dwellings on either side of it – the one to the north abutting onto Swan Lane (Mariner’s Street) and that to the south onto Tyler’s Lane (Compass Street) – whereas the 1618 Manor Roll only refers to the first of these, meaning that a plot of land to the south must have been developed later.

20. The rebuilt Town House/Chapel/Chamber remained in use until after the middle of the 19th century, when it was demolished and replaced by a new, updated civic headquarters intended solely for local government purposes. This was just one of the many innovations introduced by Samuel Morton Peto, one of the foremost contractor-builders of the time, who remodelled Lowestoft and changed it for all time during a near twenty-year period between 1844 and 1862-3. He provided railway links with Norwich (1847) and Ipswich (1859) – and from thence to the Midlands and North of England and to London and the South, greatly improved both the inner and outer parts of the harbour, boosted the local fishing industry and overseas trade, began new housing developments to the north of the Inner Harbour and established an impressive seaside resort to the south of its Bridge Channel approach. In 1841, the town’s population was 4,238; by 1891, it had reached 19,150; and in 1911 it stood at 37,886! This rapid expansion was given formal recognition on 29 August 1885, when the town was granted a charter of incorporation giving it borough status.

21. During the Peto era, towards the end of its pre-charter days, Lowestoft was governed by a combination of manor court, parish vestry and improvement commissioner procedures, but it was nevertheless given a smart new Town Hall, built 1857-60 in the popular Italianate style. It was designed by the architect J.L. Clemence, who had London origins, but who became Peto’s “man on the ground” in Lowestoft and gave visual expression to most of his developments.  The building was remodelled and extended during 1869-73 – the work, this time, being executed by W.O. Chambers, Lowestoft’s other leading architect of the time. It was then partially rebuilt and further extended during 1899-1905 – the work being necessitated, this time, by widening of the High Street – and underwent more extension-work (on the northern side) during 1912 and 1935.

22. Historic England’s listing details on this Grade II structure make no reference to the extensive cellar area beneath it, which was formerly used to store old documentation of one kind or another. I used to access this space during the mid-1980s, when I was working on deed-packets relating to the properties acquired by compulsory purchase orders prior to the widening of the High Street being carried out    – on its west side, to the north of Mariners Street. The cellars may have been newly created with the construction of Peto’s Town Hall, but it is conceivable that they might have been a feature of the previous buildings occupying the site. Many of the High Street shops and houses still have cellars beneath them, with two surviving medieval ones being present beneath No. 160 (just to the north of the Town Hall) and Nos. 41-42 (opposite it).

23. By way of a final statement concerning the history of Lowestoft Town Hall, which draws together all three buildings to have occupied the site, it may be permissible to relate a singular story attaching to them. On 14 March 1644, Oliver Cromwell came to the town with a troop of cavalry to confiscate a royalist shipment of arms which had either been landed at the town or was leaving it (it has never been established which). During his two-day visit, he placed the town under an 8 p.m. curfew. A year later, on 12 June, the iconoclast Francis Jessop (from Beccles) came to the town to remove offending religious “images” from the parish church. This included a large number of memorial brasses set into the grave-slabs of wealthy, late medieval citizens, which were ripped from their matrices. They were sold to a local merchant Josiah Wilde, who lived in a house on the site of what is now No. 2 High Street and who had the metal melted down and cast into a bell by John Brend, of Norwich. All of this was done without the knowledge of the Vicar, James Rous, who recorded his disapproval on a blank page at the end of the earliest surviving parish register-book (Norfolk Record Office, PD 589/1). The bell was installed in the Town Chamber, where it was struck 100 times each evening to indicate curfew-time - a practice which continued in the two succeeding buildings and was still being done in the later years of the 20th century - albeit by a timed electrical device and not by hand.                                                                                                       

CREDIT:David Butcher  Updated with minor changes, 9 August 2024.

See also Gillingwater’s History of Lowestoft