What's planned for the Town Hall and Albert Square
Our plans for the Town Hall and Albert Square are now well under way.
The Town Hall itself is being repaired, refurbished and brought into line with the requirements of a modern-day civic building. Much of the work, however, won’t actually show once it’s reopened. There’s a huge amount of ‘invisible’ work with this project. We’ve been taking out a lot of obsolete elements from the building. The clunky and chunky Victorian plumbing and heating has been removed. It's being replaced with new services that are built in underground, out of sight or designed to fit their situation. We also took out the inappropriately tacked on kitchen extension in the courtyard. That is being rebuilt in a style much more fitting to this iconic Grade 1 listed building.
Albert Square, meanwhile, will be very obviously different, with a 25% increase in the usable space following approval to pedestrianise all but the eastern side of the square, where the Metrolink tram runs along Princess Street. We've now completed Phase 1 of the new planting in the square - see our Albert Square Trees page to find out more.
For more detail of how the square will look when it's finished, open the Albert Square Plans album in flickr.com.