Building record BSE 670 - The Guildhall, Guildhall Street

Bury St Edmunds Guildhall is a large and impressive secular medieval building with a unique roof structure combining East Anglian queen-posts with king-posts and is likely to date from the mid-14th century rather than the late-15th century as usually suggested. Its 10 bays spanned a single hall of 38 m in length with what appears to have been a rare central entrance and its timbers retain extensive yellow ochre decoration with a decorated post above a southern dais. Documentary evidence indicates that a 15th century timber-framed detached kitchen with carved windows survived to the rear until the mid-19th century when it was completely rebuilt, retaining only a late-18th or early-19th century gable chimney to the north. Archaeological evidence of its medieval or Tudor predecessor may survive beneath its floors but nothing is visible above ground. The passage linking this kitchen to the Banqueting Hall is also a mid-19th century reconstruction, with a passage of an entirely different form shown on 18th century plans. A two storied timber framed structure with a Council Chamber on its first floor and store rooms beneath is shown abutting the back wall of the Guildhall on a plan of 1742, but this too was entirely rebuilt in 1806 when the present facade of Woolpit white brick was added. The new Chamber block also contained store rooms on its lower floor and consists of miscellaneous flint-rubble, red-brick and dressed stone that was re-used from a perimeter wall against the street (shown in a drawing of 1786 but demolished in the same year) and from the collapsed eastern wall of Moyses Hall. Contemporary accounts indicate that ceiling joists were also re-used from the earlier Council Chamber and any future alterations to the present plastered ceilings should proceed with caution. These joists may yield valuable evidence about the appearance and date of the structure from which they derived. An early well is understood to lie beneath the floor of the modern kitchen in the same building, and the Council Chamber itself, unused as such since 1877, preserves fine Georgian features including an elaborate plaster cornice and a domed ceiling with a blocked octagonal roof light. The latter was described by its architect as a ‘large lanthorne skylight’ and may have boasted a tall cupola of some form. This room now contains the viewing gallery of a WWII Observer Corps Operations Room said to be the best of its kind in the country, and emphasises the Guildhall’s historic importance as the combination of many different building phases and functions over no fewer than eight centuries (S1).