Town Hall Clock - Chester, Cheshire, England, UK.
N 53° 11.508 W 002° 53.540
30U E 507193 N 5893612
This clock is located on Chester Town Hall, Northgate Street in the city centre.
Waymark Code: WMXTYF
Location: North West England, United Kingdom
Date Posted: 02/27/2018
Views: 2
Chester Town Hall is a Grade II* listed building. It was built in 1865-69 by WH Lynn of Lanyon Lynn and Lanyon of Belfast. The building cost £40,000 (equivalent to £3,390,000 in 2016). It was officially opened on 15 October 1869 by the Prince of Wales (the future Edward VII) who was accompanied by W. E. Gladstone, the Prime Minister.
In 1897 the Council chamber was gutted by fire and was redesigned internally in 1898 by TM Lockwood. The building is constructed of banded pink and buff sandstone with a graded grey-green slate roof. (
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The Clock is located on the tower of the building. British Listed Building describe the tower as follows;
"The first stage of the tower has 2 pairs of French doors to the balcony, with colonnettes and tracery; 3 hipped dormers with ornate finials in the roof to each side of the tower; cast-iron cresting in roofs; ornate stringcourse to base of second stage of tower; triple bell-openings have boarded louvres and a gabled niche to each side; a corbelled stringcourse above; the plate tracery of a circular window in each gable of the helm spire serves as a clock-face." (
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The clock was installed in the tower in 1979. It has three faces; there is no face on the west side of the tower.
"Some myths about the clock
One often-mentioned feature of the town hall is that the clock tower only has a clock on three of the four sides, and that the clock face facing Wales is missing because the inhabitants of Chester "would not give the welsh the time of day" (see "Shoot the Welsh). The Cloth Hall in Ypres (built in 1260, destroyed in WW1 and rebuilt in 1934), upon which the Town Hall is based, also only has a clock face on three sides of the tower.
The actual clock is recent (having only been installed in 1980), as plans for the inital purchase of a clock (originally intended for Woolwich Arsenal) were cut for cost reasons and the discovery that the clock would require an hour of winding each day!" Source: (
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The ornate circular clock faces are constructed of carved stone with hollow circles in place of the numbers with simplistic gold hands.
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