The clock tower that defines the Leeds skyline was an afterthought. Brodrick added it in 1856, three years into construction, as the civic leaders sought to outdo Bradford and make a grander statement. To support a tower they were not originally building, the entrance hall had to be cramped down to a vestibule rather than the screen of columns Brodrick had imagined. He thought it worth the trade - the tower would give 'extra drama and power.' It rises 225 feet, a baroque cupola of Corinthian columns supported on the structure beneath, with clock dials by Edmund Beckett Denison and a mechanism installed by Dent of London. For 108 years from 1858 until 1966 it was the tallest thing in Leeds, only overtaken when the Park Plaza Hotel was built eight metres higher. The Pevsner verdict was hedged - the architect, Pevsner wrote, 'has not quite made up his mind whether he wanted a dome or a tower.'

Walk around the building and look up. The masks, the putti on the side panels of the main entrance, the cherubs on the clock tower - the sculptor Catherine Mawer did all of those. Her nephew William Ingle ran the stoneyards and carved every sheep-head relief, the fleeces nodding to the wool money that paid for the Town Hall. The tympanum above the south entrance - figures of Progress, Art, and Commerce - is by John Thomas. The four Portland stone lions added along the frontage in 1867 by William Day Keyworth Jr were modelled at London Zoo. Their soft stone has eroded over a century and a half of Yorkshire weather, and you can read the wear in their manes - sandstone city, Portland faces, slowly returning to surface.

Vast crowds gathered - thirty-two thousand schoolchildren assembled on Woodhouse Moor alone. Victoria stayed the night before at Woodsley House on Clarendon Road, the home of Mayor Peter Fairbairn, under tight military security. Leeds City Police were reinforced with officers from the West Riding, Bradford, London, and Birmingham. The route from the mayor's house to the city centre was carefully planned so the Queen would see much of Leeds without glimpsing the new Town Hall until the moment she rounded into East Parade and a temporary triumphal arch framed it for her. William Sterndale Bennett conducted the music festival timed to the opening, with Mendelssohn's Elijah opening proceedings and Handel's Messiah closing them. Victoria knighted Mayor Fairbairn on the steps. The Earl of Derby, the Prime Minister, declared the hall open on her behalf. Then she boarded a train at Wellington Station and rode north to Balmoral.

What looks like a temple was for over a century also a prison. The borough courtroom sits inside still, its wooden benches intact, with stairs leading down from the dock into the basement bridewell - cells located directly beneath the front steps. Major Victorian trials happened here, including the murderer Charles Peace in 1879 and Kate Dover in 1882. During the Blitz on 14 and 15 March 1941, the Luftwaffe hit the east side of the building, damaging the Calverley Street walls and roof. Evidence of the damage still remains in Victoria Gardens. The crypt became an ARP post and, from 1942, a British Restaurant serving cheap hot food, which proved so popular it survived until 1966.

For much of the twentieth century the Town Hall stood blackened by soot from the mills and chimneys that had funded it. The Leeds Civic Trust argued the blackness should remain - a 'symbol of the city's industrial past and a reminder to future generations of the air pollution which the city is so successfully combatting.' The 1972 clean-up went ahead anyway, revealing detail nobody alive had seen in colour. A more recent refurbishment began in 2019 - Page\Park Architects redesigning the interior, NPS Group replacing the entire roof in Welsh slate. On the dome, contractors found a plaque dated 1861 reading 'This dome was stripped and old lead put on after by Herbert Westcombe and Joseph Nett.' A new time capsule went in during 2019, packed by young people working with Leeds Museums and Galleries - including a Nando's menu, Lego minifigures, a mobile phone, and a Refugee Education Training Advice Service cookery book donated by a woman who had moved from Syria to Leeds the year before. The civic palace keeps adding its own layers.