Sneak peek inside Rochdale Town Hall before it’s official reopening as it becomes a new tourist attraction in Greater Manchester

National World - LocalTV

Rochdale Town Hall is set to reopen on Sunday March 3, after a huge transformation.  The project - supported by The National Lottery Heritage Fund with an £8.9 million grant - has transformed the Grade I listed building.  The renovation included restoring many of the building's historic features, creating community spaces in rooms previously out of bounds to the public, making the venue fully accessible, and opening a brand-new restaurant.  Work began in 2020, and now the vibrant space is finally ready to welcome the public and become a unique heritage tourist attraction in Greater Manchester.

Transcript

00:00 "Slowly but surely over the years those services were moved out of the building and it became an

00:05 administrative place. I don't think people necessarily thought that it was theirs to go to

00:11 or to look at. Now we've got a building that is, I think, one of the best town halls in the entire

00:18 country." Rochdale Town Hall is set to reopen on Sunday 3 March after a huge transformation.

00:25 The project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund with an £8.9 million grant,

00:30 has transformed the Grade 1 listed building. The renovation included restoring many of the

00:35 building's historic features, creating community spaces in rooms previously out of bounds to the

00:41 public, making the venue fully accessible and opening a brand new restaurant. Work began in

00:47 2020 and now the vibrant space is finally ready to welcome the public and become a unique heritage

00:54 tourist attraction in Greater Manchester. "We've ripped out the, I'm going to call them the

01:00 modernisations of the 1970s when mezzanine floors and various partitions were put into the building

01:08 and we've taken it back to what it was originally. So this has involved, as I say, contractors but

01:14 it's also involved 500 plus volunteers that have been here with cotton swabs and hard work and

01:23 hours and hours of hard work and they've taken every layer of muck and varnish and nicotine off

01:30 the beautiful, absolutely gorgeous carvings and beams that there are in the building plus the

01:39 walls because the walls are painted, there is no wallpaper on the walls, they're painted

01:44 and all that had to be cleaned as well. The stained glass, every single stained glass piece

01:51 has been cleaned and a couple of them have been restored and we hope to do more of that in the

01:57 future. If you look around this room that we're in, you can see angels at the bottom of every beam,

02:03 they were covered over. There are lots and lots of angels around the building that have been

02:07 closed in for dozens of years and now we've released them back into the fresh air as it

02:15 were. We didn't realise that the angels in the Great Hall, which are beautifully marked,

02:22 we didn't realise that they had patterns on them. We thought that they were just one colour

02:26 and then as people started to clean them, the motifs underneath emerged from the grime.

02:32 The Town Hall will be open seven days a week as a tourist attraction and there are plans for the

02:37 Grand Venue to host large-scale events such as weddings and conferences.

02:42 So it basically brings our Town Hall back to the people. It's been offices, it's been used as an

02:49 administrative centre rather than the beautiful building that it is so people can come and see

02:56 what it was like in its heyday. It is basically a monument to industry of sorts but it's for the

03:04 people to come in and have a look. As you can see, there is now a lot of glass in the building so you

03:09 can say into things that you couldn't say into before.

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