The first owner

A portrait of John Woodall is hanging in the Committee Room. In 1844, John Woodall had the house demolished and replaced by an impressive red-brick mansion named St Nicholas House. The building was designed by Henry Wyatt who displayed the design at the Royal Academy in 1852. The style of the house is Jacobean. There are two storeys and an attic, all in red brick with stone dressings, plinth, string courses, cornice and parapet. In 1898, John Woodall’s son, John W Woodall, whose portrait hangs in the entrance foyer, and who had inherited the property on the death of his father in 1879, offered St Nicholas House to the Corporation, who purchased the building for £33,575. The sale price included St Nicholas House, three properties on St Nicholas Street, Granby House (soon after demolished on the site of the sunken gardens), the St Nicholas under-cliff, the Exhibition Hall on the Foreshore Road (which, having survived as the old Olympia, was destroyed by fire in 1975), the adjacent Coastguard Station and the old reading room and library at the top of King’s Steps. In the same year work began on the new town hall at a total cost of £18,522