Thornaby Town Hall

In anticipation of the South Stockton area being designated a municipal borough in 1892,[2] civic leaders decided to procure a dedicated town hall: the site they selected was a developing area occupied by some clay pits in what had previously been close to the Mandale Marshes just south of South Stockton railway station.[3][4]

The foundation stone for the new building was laid by the chairman of the South Stockton local board of health, John Steel, on 25 October 1890.[5] It was designed by James Garry of West Hartlepool in the Renaissance style, built by W. C. Atkinson and was officially opened as Thornaby Town Hall in 1892.[1] The design involved a chamfered main frontage at the junction of Mandale Road and Railway Terrace; the corner section featured a double window on the ground floor, an oriel window on the first floor and a clock tower with cupola and weather vane above.[1] The Mandale road elevation featured a doorway with brackets supporting an entablature and round headed windows with stained glass fanlights on the first floor; the Railway Terrace elevation had two bays with windows in a similar style to the Mandale Road elevation, but the bays further along the street displayed conventional sash windows on both floors.[1] However, Pevsner said that the town hall exhibited "a totally undistinguished design on a visually most unsuitable site".[6]

The clock, which was made by Potts of Leeds[7] and donated by the first mayor of the town, Alderman William Anderson, was started on 27 January 1892.[5] Internally, the principal rooms were the council chamber and the mayor's parlour.[8]

The building continued to serve as the headquarters of Thornaby Borough Council for much of the 20th century but ceased to be the local seat of government when the short-lived County Borough of Teesside was formed in 1967.[9] It then remained largely unused, in the ownership of Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council from 1974, until Stockton Council decided to sell the building to a developer, Python Properties, in January 2010.[8] After the sale to Python fell through in May 2011,[10] Stockton Council carried out a consultation on its future use in September 2011.[11] The consultation resulted in Thornaby Town Council, which had been formed in 1995,[12] agreeing to acquire the building in May 2012[13] and completing the transaction in November 2012.[14]

An extensive programme of renovation works costing £900,000, funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund,[15] was initiated by the town council in autumn 2017, with the intention that the works would act as a catalyst for further regeneration in the area.[16] After the actual cost of renovation exceeded the budget by £250,000, the town's mayor, Steve Walmsley, indicated in November 2019 that the extra cost would be recovered through council tax increases.[17]