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Engraving showing interior of the Town Hall. The ceiling and lights are ornate and the scene shows a dance or ball. The Great Hall of Leeds Town Hall, said the 'Illustrated London News', 'whether viewed in relation to its size, the harmony of its proportions, or the extreme beauty of its decorations, (is) one of the noblest public rooms in the country'. This 1858 engraving by O. Jewitt of J.H. Metcalfe's drawing shows the room, 161 feet long and 72 feet wide, with its extraordinary vaulted ceiling springing from a line 53 feet above floor level to a height of 73 feet. The deterioration of the plasterwork led to a full-scale restoration of the hall in 1978; no cartoons of the original decorations survived, but the hall was redecorated to the scheme used in 1895 by John Dibble Crace, brother of the original decorator. The organ, one of the largest in Europe at the time of its building, was designed by Henry Smart of London and William Spark of Leeds, and built by Gray and Davison of London between August 1857 and April 1859. The case was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick and made by Thorp and Atkinson of Leeds. Although not finished, the organ was first played at the opening of the Town Hall and at the first Leeds Musical Festival which followed, but it was publicly inaugurated by Smart and Spark on its completion, on 7 April 1859. It was virtually rebuilt in 1971-2. | License: | http://www.leodis.net/article.aspx?id=12 | Rights holder: | Leeds Central Library | Subjects: | engraving Town Hall The Victoria Hall | Source: | Leodis - A photographic archive of Leeds | Identifier: | http://www.leodis.net/display.aspx?id=91... | Go to resource |
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