Assembly Rooms, Presteigne

In the early 1860s, a group of local businessmen led by the local member of parliament, Sir Richard Green-Price, whose seat was at Norton Manor, decided to form a company known as the "Presteigne Market Hall & Public Room Company" to finance and erect a new municipal building for the town:^[2] the site they selected in Broad Street^[a] had been occupied by the local post office and, before that, by the Black Lion Inn.^[4]

The foundation stone for the new building was laid by Lady Mary Jones-Brydges on 23 October 1863.^[5] It was designed by Thomas Nicholson of Hereford in the Italianate style, built in red brick with stone finishings and the market hall was officially opened to the public on 1 November 1865.^[5][6] The design involved an asymmetrical main frontage with four bays facing onto Broad Street; the left hand bay, which slightly projected forward, took the form of a three-stage clock tower with a doorway with a moulded segmental architrave in the first stage, a lancet window in the second stage and clock faces with ornamental stone surrounds in the third stage, all surmounted by a pyramid-shaped roof and a weather vane. The other three bays contained openings with voussoirs on the ground floor and round headed windows with voussoirs on the first floor. There were three bays finished in a similar style in Hereford Street and, at roof level, there was a wide cornice supported by brackets. Internally, the principal rooms were the market hall on the ground floor and the assembly rooms on the first floor.^[1]

In the early years of the life of the building, the assembly rooms were used for petty session hearings and the building was referred to as the "Town Hall".^[7] However, the company which had developed the building got into financial difficulty from an early stage and, in 1882, ownership passed to Elizabeth Abley who, as the principal lender, held a mortgage over the building.^[8] The borough council, which had not met for many years, was abolished under the Municipal Corporations Act 1883.^[9]

Following significant population growth, largely associated with the status of Presteigne as a market town, the area became an urban district in 1894.^[10] The new urban district council acquired the building in 1903 and used the assembly rooms as council offices and, following a decline in use of the market, converted the former market hall for storage of the local horse-drawn fire engine.^[11]

A cinema operated on the first floor of the building from 1934 until it closed in 1966.^[12] The building subsequently accommodated a furniture shop and then, after a period of disuse, Mid Border Arts, which had been established in the Shire Hall in 1988, moved into the assembly rooms in 1992.^[8] An extensive programme of refurbishment works costing £95,000, carried out with financial support from the Arts Council of Wales, was completed in 1995.^[13] The works included fitting out the ground floor for use as a public library^[14] and the first floor for use as an arts centre.^[8]