musical.today Truro, United Kingdom
Hall for Cornwall
It was Truro's market hall and council chamber before it was a theatre, and it kept the name City Hall until 1997. The Italianate granite front on Boscawen Street, the clock of 1854 and the tower of 1858 are all still there; the auditorium behind them is not the one the Victorians built.
The building
Truro's first municipal building here was a seventeenth-century market house, arcaded so that trading could go on underneath an assembly room. It was replaced in 1809, found wanting again, and rebuilt to Christopher Eales's design in granite ashlar, finished in 1846.
The north end held a courtroom and a council chamber, the south end the market. The suffragist Helen Beedy argued for votes for women at a public meeting in the building in December 1874, three years before Truro became a city.
Opening dates, capacities and architects on this page come from the theatre's own history pages and from Wikipedia.