00:00 "Slowly but surely over the years those services were moved out of the building and it became an
00:05 administrative place. I don't think people necessarily thought that it was theirs to go to
00:11 or to look at. Now we've got a building that is, I think, one of the best town halls in the entire
00:18 country." Rochdale Town Hall is set to reopen on Sunday 3 March after a huge transformation.
00:25 The project, supported by the National Lottery Heritage Fund with an £8.9 million grant,
00:30 has transformed the Grade 1 listed building. The renovation included restoring many of the
00:35 building's historic features, creating community spaces in rooms previously out of bounds to the
00:41 public, making the venue fully accessible and opening a brand new restaurant. Work began in
00:47 2020 and now the vibrant space is finally ready to welcome the public and become a unique heritage
00:54 tourist attraction in Greater Manchester. "We've ripped out the, I'm going to call them the
01:00 modernisations of the 1970s when mezzanine floors and various partitions were put into the building
01:08 and we've taken it back to what it was originally. So this has involved, as I say, contractors but
01:14 it's also involved 500 plus volunteers that have been here with cotton swabs and hard work and
01:23 hours and hours of hard work and they've taken every layer of muck and varnish and nicotine off
01:30 the beautiful, absolutely gorgeous carvings and beams that there are in the building plus the
01:39 walls because the walls are painted, there is no wallpaper on the walls, they're painted
01:44 and all that had to be cleaned as well. The stained glass, every single stained glass piece
01:51 has been cleaned and a couple of them have been restored and we hope to do more of that in the
01:57 future. If you look around this room that we're in, you can see angels at the bottom of every beam,
02:03 they were covered over. There are lots and lots of angels around the building that have been
02:07 closed in for dozens of years and now we've released them back into the fresh air as it
02:15 were. We didn't realise that the angels in the Great Hall, which are beautifully marked,
02:22 we didn't realise that they had patterns on them. We thought that they were just one colour
02:26 and then as people started to clean them, the motifs underneath emerged from the grime.
02:32 The Town Hall will be open seven days a week as a tourist attraction and there are plans for the
02:37 Grand Venue to host large-scale events such as weddings and conferences.
02:42 So it basically brings our Town Hall back to the people. It's been offices, it's been used as an
02:49 administrative centre rather than the beautiful building that it is so people can come and see
02:56 what it was like in its heyday. It is basically a monument to industry of sorts but it's for the
03:04 people to come in and have a look. As you can see, there is now a lot of glass in the building so you
03:09 can say into things that you couldn't say into before.
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