Hall for Cornwall

The first municipal building in Truro was a 17th-century market house, which was arcaded on the ground floor so that markets could be held, with an assembly hall on the first floor. It was replaced with a more substantial structure in 1809 but when that was also found to be inadequate, civic leaders commissioned a new building on the same site in the early 1840s. A clocktower was installed on the Boscawen Street frontage in 1858. The suffragette, Helen Beedy, gave a speech advocating voting rights for women at a public meeting in the building in December 1874. In 1877, when Truro became a city, the complex was renamed Truro City Hall. This resulted in the market hall being operated as a…