The maker of two Ludlow models of the previous toen halls that are no longer there, talks us through a bit about there story and history, ahead of an upcoming exhibition in the town. Not wishing to seek the limelight and put the focus purely on the models and exhibition we hear is voice over images of some of the exhibition pieces.
Category
🗞
NewsTranscript
00:00This is the model of the Ludlow Town Hall that came in 1704.
00:06It was a hundred feet long approximately.
00:09I have no real reference for the size because I built this from photographs.
00:14Luckily I did find a view of it in plan on a pre-map of Ludlow from 1884
00:24It says the back version. The entrance at the back is bigger than this front version.
00:30I had to rip it all down. It was open market. It was covered but open.
00:35But above it had a big office space, presumably for council dealings. I don't know.
00:44I have no plans of this at all. I built this from a photograph, that's all.
00:50The dimensions might be plus or minus, who knows.
00:55It's the best effort I can do to provide you with what looks like Ludlow Town Hall 1704.
01:03It was knocked down in 1886 to make way for the bigger version.
01:09Was it knocked down purely because they thought we'd have something bigger and better?
01:13Or was there an issue with the building at the time and it was crumbling anyway?
01:18I have a story, I don't know if it's true, but it was dilapidated in 1886.
01:25And the people, it was actually going to be knocked down presumably anyway because it was dilapidated.
01:30But what dilapidated in them terms means I don't really know.
01:35Yeah, yeah. And in terms of the new building that went up, you prefer I presume the new building?
01:43Well, I mean it's not there now, but the one that replaced this, would you prefer more architectural merit?
01:49Or do you like this one?
01:52This is a very plain building, but it's light years up on what they had before presumably,
01:56which is just presumably what we have now, the tented market.
02:00Yeah. And it was a step forward because it had cover and it had office space.
02:05And presumably at the time in 1704, councils were taking over more of the duties of providing facilities and services.
02:15I don't know. It's very difficult to find anything at all about this building.
02:19Like the other one, there's no plans and very little information.
02:26And that building that came along and replaced this, tell us a little bit about that one that you do know about it and why it's not there anymore.
02:35The new building that replaced this in 1887 was by a chap called Cheers,
02:41who was a well-known architect and he put a proposal along with others.
02:47It was an open competition to have a town hall, a new one, and he won.
02:54He also built Hereford and I believe he built others and many other buildings as well in the country up until 1915.
03:04I think when he died, he was a well-known architect.
03:08Yeah. The building itself was a light years up on this because it had a covered market.
03:15It had council offices, a mayor's parlor, a stage, a dance floor that was sprung, beautiful dance floor.
03:25It had ladies and gents changing rooms, had a beautiful curved ceiling.
03:31It was a wonderful panelled ceiling as well.
03:34It also had a feature, which was a horse, a full-sized horse that was in the building.
03:41And this became an icon.
03:45And if people in Ludlow said, I'm going to the horse, it meant they were going to the town hall.
03:53And you will see in the model, the model of that, there is the horse up above the main entrance on the upper floor.
04:02So why is that building no longer there? What happened then?
04:06The building over the years was neglected.
04:11And a lot of work was supposed to have been done through the years by the councils and it didn't.
04:19And eventually it caught up with them and they said, this is to be believed or not,
04:24that it was going to catastrophically fall down at a moment's notice.
04:28This was in 1886. At a council meeting in 1886,
04:35the South Shropshire District Council decided that they were going to knock it down.
04:40And not only were they going to knock it down, but they were going to start doing it in seven days time.
04:46There was no decision. There was no planning permission and they didn't get planning permission
04:51for this building to be knocked down until two and a half months later when they got retrospective planning.
04:57Yeah. If you'd like to see the documents involved in this, I've been carefully researching them
05:05and you can go online to the Shropshire portal and you can see what is supposed to be the planning application
05:16and the details of it. But 25 years later, there is a little bit of a strange carry on there. I don't know.
05:27Yeah. So this model and the other one, which is a giant, isn't it? Ten foot long.
05:34They're going to be forming part of an exhibition.
05:37Just tell us a bit about when that is, where it is and what will be included.
05:41The exhibition is going to be in the church, sorry, in St. Lawrence's Church, Ludlow,
05:46from the 17th of February 2025 until the 2nd of March, two weeks.
05:55And that will be this model, the early one, 1704, the model that followed it, 1886 to 1986.
06:07And all of my photographs, as many as I can get in the space, which gives details of the history of these buildings,
06:18what I know of it. Yeah. And how did you get into model making?
06:22Is it a passion you've had all your life? No. I used to be a member of an art group in Ludlow
06:30that was on once a week for 18 weeks with winter. And each year we used to have a special topic.
06:37Yeah. In 1919, the topic was architecture in Ludlow.
06:42And I decided to research the town hall and do a painting of the East End.
06:54And that was it. Yeah. And at the end of the 18 weeks, we'd have an exhibition
06:59and people would look at it and say, well, it's a good, bad or indifferent, usually bad.
07:02But so that was that. However, halfway through the course, COVID came along.
07:09OK. And we had the lockdown. So I'm in my workshop.
07:15And I'm sort of stumped with a situation where I have the front of the town hall as a painting and nothing else and nothing else to do.
07:26So I thought, oh, well, I've got plenty of time. Let's let's make a wooden front.
07:30A 3D sort of thing. Yeah. And when I when I produced that, I thought, oh, it would be nice.
07:42I think just perhaps do a bit more of the rest of it. Yeah.
07:45The only snag is that if you if you start by one scale, I was going to say you've got it.
07:52Yeah. And so you've got to take take. Yeah.
07:56Yeah. Otherwise the thing will look completely disjointed.
07:59Yeah. And if you look at it carefully and say this building is 40 foot wide and 150 foot long.
08:06Once you've built the first piece, you're stuck. Yeah.
08:09But being you know, being a sort of optimistic sort of person, not realising totally how big this thing would really be.
08:17Yeah. I built it in sections and lo and behold, it ended up to be about 10 foot long.
08:22Yeah. But I've enjoyed every minute doing it. It's been a wonderful it's a wonderful building.
08:28I hear stories about a guy called Pesner, who's a sort of an intellectual chap who came to Ludlow and said that this building was Ludlow's bad luck.
08:42To me, Ludlow's bad luck was the fact he ever appeared in Ludlow because people he had an idea that buildings should have their only worth is the aesthetic beauty of them.
08:54Not what they did for the community. Yeah. Now, people in Ludlow didn't care a tinker's cuss what the building looked like.
09:03It's what went on inside. Yeah. And it was a beautiful place. It had wonderful sprung dance floor.
09:08I mean, it was just amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And when you look at the facilities of that, there are about 11 facilities provided.
09:19In the older one, the 1704, there was about six facilities. It even had a gent's toilet in 1704, which is quite advanced.
09:30And I only found that out by a fluke of finding a plan of Ludlow from the Scottish National Library.
09:39And it just showed the town hall shape and how it stood within the dimensions of the market.
09:46Yeah. So I can get a approximate. And it is approximate. This is one in 30. One centimetre on here is one foot on the ground.
09:55So would you like these to have a permanent home somewhere in the centre of Ludlow?
10:01I personally think that these buildings are arguably have done the most for the people of Ludlow of any building ever.
10:13They've done more. The church, of course, I'm not talking about spiritual things or religious things.
10:18I'm talking about what they actually did in terms of providing.
10:22They were like a supermarket because people went there to buy their weekly groceries, meat, fish, whatever, everything.
10:30And they were the sort of centre of Ludlow.
10:36If you had a problem and you went, you wanted to fix a council problem or you wanted to get some food or you want to go to dancing
10:44or you want to see Steve Davis and Howard Higgins play snooker.
10:48Yeah. And there's one classic case of they put a snooker table on the dance floor.
10:55And when the crowd came in, they found that the balls were moving.
11:00Yeah. All exhibitions. And of course, one of the great things was they had the Ludlow Amateur Dramatic Society used to provide plays,
11:12pantomimes, children's, and they produced wonderful things in here.
11:17And not only them, but it was a sort of centre for everything.
11:21Yeah. You could rent this. Yeah. You could rent it.
11:24And it had, you know, facilities for ladies and gents, cloak rooms.
11:30It had a stage. It was a great place.
11:34So would you like to see the models that you've created kind of on display somewhere as a permanent fixture in the town?
11:42I think myself, not because they're mine, I have no problem with that.
11:47I don't want to do this in terms of people saying, oh, you've done this for publicity.
11:53I would be completely anonymous if necessary.
11:56But I think these are so important.
11:58And if they are lost, because we're now coming to a stage where we're about 39 years since the time it was knocked down.
12:07Yeah. It's going beyond living memory. Yeah, true.
12:10And when things go beyond living memory, they actually are lost.
12:16Yeah. Now, if you look at the people that are in Ludlow now over the age of probably 45.
12:24And you ask them about the town hall. I've got hundreds of anecdotes.
12:29People got married there. People saw snooker, boxing, the boxing.
12:35Ludlow Boxing Club had an event there every year, black tie.
12:40And they had hundreds of people. And I met a chap who was in the brewery when it was in the brewery who came up to me and he was like boxing.
12:48He was like he was like he was doing a bit of a dance.
12:51And he said, I remember having my last fight in the town hall.
12:55They said it was raucous. There's hundreds of people.
12:59And it was a joyous place. And it was right in the middle.
13:03And now what have we got? Well, I won't comment on that.
13:07People can see what there is. They just have to go up to the market square and see what there is.
13:11And then make an assessment and say, we had this building and we've now got this space.
13:18So what if if you were to have your model somewhere?
13:21What if, you know, Jules Ailes said, right, we'll have them in the Rose and Crown.
13:24We'll find a spot for them. Would you would you like them?
13:27We'd be happy for them to go in there. I think that I think I think it would make a very good backdrop.
13:35And I think that's so important. And it's really it really I feel really badly that I did say I did say that.
13:46What I would do if I couldn't find a space was I'd build a raft and put them on a raft.
13:52I'd set fire to them and have a Viking funeral.
13:56You should never do that. I think it's a beautiful model.
14:00And, you know, we'll see the other one. This is fairly rough.
14:03When you see the other one, you'll think, OK, yeah.
14:07Well, thank you on behalf of the town, really, for bringing, you know, that part of the history alive in a different sense,
14:14in a different scale. So, yeah, thank you. Well, I'm not from Ludlow, but my wife is.
14:18Yeah. And all her family are from the Ludlow area.
14:22And I love this building. Luckily, I've been coming to Ludlow since the early 80s.
14:27So I didn't know it. I've been there. I've done that. And I think it was a great shame.
14:34It could have been saved. It would be saved today. I don't think they'd be able to knock it down today.
14:39But I have to leave it to people to make their own assessment.
14:46So there was something you were thinking about the building that replaced this one.
14:51There was a basement. Well, yeah, there was a basement for two reasons.
14:55One, there's very little information on the basement. But the gents and ladies toilet, I believe,
15:01actually you went in at the ground level and then down to the toilets.
15:06Yeah. And it also had three chimneys. And those chimneys must have gone down to the basement because there was no
15:14there was no facilities for them to have a boiler in the open, the covered market.
15:20So I believe and I might be wrong. This is total speculation.
15:26Now I'm talking hypothetical. If you look at the basement,
15:33it was 150 foot long and 40 foot wide. Yeah. Big space.
15:38It must have had boilers, all the ducting for the presumably beginning it had gas lighting
15:45because electric wasn't in Ludlow till 1917.
15:50It must have had all sorts of offices and facilities.
15:55And I believe it could still be there. Could still be there.
16:01When they demolished the build, the big one that was the last big town hall.
16:06Do you know if any of the kind of particularly nice carved stone features were ever salvaged and used anywhere else?
16:14Of the new of the 1860s, the one that's not there. Yeah.
16:18Well, this is an interesting point. I don't believe too much was salvaged because
16:25the question you have to ask is where did hundreds of tons of rubble go to?
16:30Now, if you look at the documents on the planning portal,
16:35you'll see that the council had lots of lorries, 15 tonne lorries,
16:42and they were shipping that stuff out to Richard's Castle, a site in Richard's Castle.
16:46OK. Now, if you look at the if you look at around Ludlow,
16:52you find that there are gardens with pieces of the town hall. Yeah.
16:56There are buildings that have actually been built completely out of the bricks of the town hall.
17:01Yeah. And there are walls in which you can see bits of the decorative features.
17:08Yeah. But you see, the thing was knocked down in such great haste.
17:13There was no there was no care or consideration. It was a wham bam.
17:16Thank you, Pam. But. The basement.
17:22Could be there. Yeah. If you look at Manchester Town Hall, for example,
17:28they found the drawings for the town hall in a building in the basement.
17:35There was part of the World War Two people where people went down.
17:41Yeah. During the bombing. Yeah. And it had been bricked over and it and they found the drawings.
17:47Now, there are no drawings anywhere to be found of the town hall.
17:53Yeah. And I think that's a tragedy because I feel that all a lot of documents.
17:59I've done freedom of information requests to Stropshire Council. I have looked everywhere.
18:05I've asked everybody and nobody can come up with a plan.
18:09Now, these documents must have been numerous, large and detailed.
18:14Yeah. How can you maintain if you say that slightly?
18:20How do you maintain a building if you haven't got any drawings? Yeah.
18:23Now, why would you destroy the book, the drawings? They're historic documents.
18:27Yeah, true. And but the basement could still be there.
18:33It could be intact and it could be full of stuff that's from the town hall.
18:37I'm not saying it is, but possibly it could be.