Old Town Hall (2)
The Old Town Hall faces Market Street and adjoining is the Old Market Tavern, formerly The Unicorn, which is a listed building and on a burgage plot. It was a mail coaching inn, had livery stables and was used as an Excise Office. The stagecoach from Manchester to Chester used to call each morning and deliver the post and newspapers (newspapers were more than £10 each at today’s rates). It is said that Guy Fawkes was carried wounded from Malpas through Altrincham to Ordsall Hall, Salford.
In the 17th and 18th centuries a spring came past the Unicorn and ran down the middle of Victoria Street. It then joined the stream from Hale Moss that was used to feed mills in the Mill Street area and which was then channelled to feed the lake, moat and saw mill at Dunham Hall three miles away. The landlord of the Unicorn is said to have used the spring to turn a small water wheel for milling.
On the wall of the Old Market Tavern is a Blue Plaque commemorating the lighting of the hotel from the first gasworks in the Altrincham area in 1844, the gas plant for which was at the back of the hotel.
On the Church Street side of the Old Market Tavern is the Old Town Hall with its clock tower. It was built by the Earl of Stamford in 1849 and is listed. It sits on a burgage plot which previously contained the Unicorn stables. The oriel window on the Church Street side is in the Council Chamber where the Court Leet met. The basement was used by Tuesday market folk until the new market hall was built and as a soup kitchen before and during the 1914-18 War and in the 1920s. The bell tower is a copy of the original 1684 buttermarket bell tower and the original bell was re-hung here but is now in the possession of the Court Leet. This bell was used to summon the volunteer fire brigade until 1866 when the Police Station on the Dunham Road opened. There are holes in the cornice to the right of the yard entrance where the chain to the clock bell went, together with the hooks on which it was put out of the reach of children. The Old Town Hall was merged with the Unicorn about 1910.
The Orange Tree to the south of the Old Market Tavern and some of the adjacent buildings have fragments of 16th and 17th century buildings. The Orange Tree, which has been a pub only since the 1880’s, consists of two ancient timber buildings which had an alley on the left and has wattle and daub remains in a back room. To the south of the Orange Tree in 1880 was a shop, then the Horse & Jockey Inn and then the Red Lion Inn (now a restaurant). In his novel ‘Peveril of the Peak’ Sir Walter Scott, who had friends in the area, named a pub in ‘Altringham’ as ‘The Cat and Fiddle’, another name for The Red Lion, which had housed Jacobite troops in 1745.