Not many tears are likely to be shed over the Town Hall, which, as announced yesterday, is to be handed over to the purchasers as soon ax possible after next ra-repayers' meeting. Its one merit is that it is a really solid piece of building and, in these days of all pervading reinforced concrete and flaunting decoration, its grave, brickwork exterior ix not without a certain impressiveness, But for practical uses, the Town Hall failed through trying to do too much, It started as q drill hall, hence the unbending firmness of the floor, which one realized so painfully when, having been converted into a Town Hall, it was used for.public dances. Tt' is one of the Worst Guildings for sound that the present writer has ever been in. And its sents—though these are, perhaps, not the architects' fault—might really be put in any collec tion of racks, thumbscrews and scavenger's daughters as a sample of nineteenth century instruments of torture. Yet one has had some ood times at the Town Hall. One remembers particularly a St, George's ball with the whole of the west end filled in with a n production of an old English mansion, by Mr. Chris Wingrove. All the St. Andrew's balls in the Town Hall gained, from the decoration there possible, a certain old-world distinctiveness which, "pleasant as these evenings always are, cannot be transplanted elsewhere. In bygone days the hall has heard much heated oratory, when ratepayers were loss introspective than they have since become; and who that lived through it will ever forget the famous Yangkingpang meeting of 1909, when there was nothing to
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.