TOWN HALL, BOLTON.
Bolton is especially proud of its Town Hall, which was opened in 1873, and was the first of those immense buildings, of a monumental character, that of late years have been built in hundreds of towns, less to fill a need than to please the vanity of mayors and aldermen. No wonder, when municipalities build palaces for themselves, and house every department royally and regardless of cost, the rates go mounting ever higher.
BOLTON TOWN HALL
The Town Hall of Bolton, designed in a composite classic style, is, in most of its circumstances, a good deal more imposing than useful. A weary flight of steps leads lengthily up to the colonnaded portico, and although it looks magnificent, is, practically, a sorrow to all who have often to scale it.
A clock-tower, 220 feet in height, surmounts this elephantine building, which cost £170,000, and has so imposing an appearance that it has been the parent of many others; the design having been so admired that it was closely copied in every detail by Leeds, Portsmouth, and other towns; Paddington also proposing to build itself one upon the same model. But the Bolton parent of them all has become very grim; being, by reason of the smoke from the two hundred or so lofty factory chimneys of the town, “as black as your hat.”
XI
FIRWOOD: BIRTHPLACE OF CROMPTON.
The most interesting places in Bolton are—to speak in paradox—just outside it. On the Bury road, where the electric tramcars race, you may with some difficulty find the little turning at Firwood, where the humble birthplace of Samuel Crompton still stands. Along the main road the modern houses march prosaically on to Bury, but down this little turning, which descends steeply and has the most extravagantly uneven paving anywhere in the neighbourhood, you find a nook very much in the condition of the whole countryside in Crompton’s day. Always excepting, of course, the big cotton-mill that stands here. Looking down towards Bolton there are still fragments of woods and tangled brakes—fir-woods, or others—but on the skyline, as ever in Lancashire, are factory chimneys, wreathing fantastic smoke-trails. Among the three cottages here, Crompton’s early home is identified by a stone tablet inscribed—