Town Hall, Town Hall Square, Great Harwood

Great Harwood became an urban district in 1894. Almost immediately the Urban District Council commenced work on new municipal offices which were to be erected on a prominent site at the junction of Queen Road and Blackburn Road in the centre of the town occupied by a row of old cottages at the time. These offices were part of a larger development to create a new Town Hall Square, which also involved the building of the Manchester and County Bank (later the NatWest Bank) on a corner site to the north of the town hall, also completed in 1900, and the Mercer Memorial Tower commemorating the life of the scientist, John Mercer, completed in 1903. A proposed covered market hall originally proposed in the square never materialised. 

Designed by Briggs and Wolstenholme in the Baroque style, the Town Hall opened in 1900 at a cost of about £5,000. The building consists of council chamber, court room, and committee rooms at first floor level with separate offices for the clerk, surveyor, sanitary inspector overseer and collector on the ground floor. The scheme had a symmetrical main frontage of five bays facing onto the new square with the end bays, which slightly projected forward, displaying Diocletian windows on the ground floor, three-light sash windows on the first floor flanked by corbelled corners with turrets above and oculi in the gables. The central section of three bays featured a doorway with a Gibbs surround and a segmental pediment on the ground floor, two-light sash windows in each of the bays on the first floor and dormer windows at attic level. 

The Town Hall remained in use until 1974 when local government reorganisation led to the formation of the much larger Hyndburn Borough Council. It subsequently remained vacant in a semi-derelict state until it was acquired by a developer, Globe Enterprises. After a programme of works costing £500,000, it re-opened as an office complex known as "The Chambers" in May 2011. 

Five bays, with the heavy Gibbs surrounds revived in the late nineteenth century with so much gusto. [Pevsner: North Lancashire Page 132]