The building was commissioned by a group of businessmen, led by Admiral Sir George Broke-Middleton of Shrubland Hall, who set up a private company to finance and commission a municipal building for the benefit of the town.[2] The site they selected, which was in the High Street, was occupied by a cottage which had been the birthplace of the artist, Samuel Read.[3][4] The building was designed by Frederick Barnes in the Italianate style, built by a local contractor, H. Godfrey, in red and buff bricks at a cost of £1,300 and was completed in late 1866.[1]
The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with three bays facing onto the High Street. The central bay, which slightly projected forward at ground floor level, featured a round headed entrance with imposts supporting an architrave: there were three deeply-recessed narrow round headed windows on the first floor. The outer bays were fenestrated by tripartite sash windows on the ground floor and by single deeply-recessed round headed windows on the first floor. At roof level, there was a parapet and a modillioned cornice, while the corners were decorated by full-height piers surmounted by small pediments. Internally, the principal rooms were the lecture room, which was at the front of the building on the first floor, a courtroom, a public library and a reading room. There were also offices for the local police officers and a lock-up for petty criminals.[5]
A commemorative stone, recording Broke-Middleton's patronage, as well as the names of the architect and the builder, was installed above the entrance by Broke-Middleton himself in June 1866.[6] The architectural historian, Nikolaus Pevsner, was unimpressed with the design and referred to it as "a sad building of yellow and red brick with lean round arches".[7]
In the 19th century, the courtroom was used for fortnightly petty session hearings for the Bosmere and Claydon Hundred, one of the ancient hundreds of Suffolk.[8] During the Second World War, the town hall narrowly missed being demolished on 19 October 1942 when a German bomb fell on a site just to the south of the building, killing four civilians and injuring many more.[9][10] The company which had financed and commissioned the building was wound-up in 1948[11] and the building was subsequently converted for commercial use: it has since been used by a variety of local businesses including a publishing house[12] and an antiques centre.[13][14]
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