Looking today at Rotherham's modern town centre, dominated by its immense medieval parish church, it is hard to imagine the legacy that our Victorian forebears left to the town. Yet some of the town centre's most important buildings and streets owe their existence to the second half of the 19th century, and this walk introduces the visitor to the best of these.
Leaving the Tourist Information Centre and walking across Effingham Square, almost the first building encountered is the Effingham Arms, opened in 1860. Effingham Street is one of a group of streets originating from a private Act of Parliament in 1851 which enabled the Earl of Effingham, the principal local landowner, to develop the town centre; the new streets were given names connected with his family - Effingham Street, Howard Street and Frederick Street. If you walk along Effingham Street and look high up to your right, you will see Rotherham's only statue, a weather-worn Queen Victoria. The Queen stands on the summit of the Old Town Hall, a shopping precinct developed in the 1980s from a complex of Victorian buildings.
The Effingham Street frontage, below Queen Victoria's statue, was erected in 1888 as the Victoria Jubilee Memorial, and housed the School of Science and Art until the new Rotherham College premises were built in 1931. The Howard Street/Effingham Street corner housed the Mechanics Institute, created in 1853 to provide elementary and technical education for the working classes.
In 1895 the Institute's first floor concert room became the town's Assembly Rooms, and a carved inscription can still be seen high above the corner. On Howard Street, the Town Hall itself dates from 1871, though occupying buildings were first constructed in 1851. After extensive remodelling in 1895 the Town Hall lasted until the 1980s when it was relocated first to Elliott House on the site of the present Interchange, and later to the former courthouse on the Crofts.
Finally, the brick building on Frederick Street next to the Effingham Arms served as the town's Police Headquarters from 1897 until 1982, with the stone-built site now occupied by Burger King, also constructed in 1897 to house the Borough's Court House. A tour of the complex reveals several surviving Victorian features, including windows with carved mullions, stained glass and a coloured mosaic of the Borough's corporate seal set in the floor.
Continue along Effingham Street and turn right into Red Lion Yard. The Radio Rentals shop on the corner dates from the 1860s and has some interesting detailing around the first floor window. The building society offices on the opposite corner were formally the Falstaff Inn, built in brick in 1869. Entering the alley, you will see by a bricked up doorway on your right the words National Union of Stove Grate Workers, founded in Rotherham in 1890.
Turning left at the end of the alley, you find yourself in All Saints Square, dominated by the magnificent All Saints Church, extensively restored by Sir George Gilbert Scott between 1873 and 1875 using sandstone from the nearby Canklow quarries. In early Victorian times the graveyard above the Square was coming to be regarded as a public disgrace, with skulls and bones clearly visible on the surface, and in 1854 it was closed to new burials. Walk up Church Street and into the churchyard, and outside the south transept of the church you will find the last surviving gas lamp that lit the town in the nineteenth century.
Walking back through the churchyard and across Church Street, you reach the National Westminster Bank on the corner of Corporation Street and Market Street. This significant Victorian building dates from 1893/4 when it was rebuilt in "Rotherham Red" sandstone to house the Sheffield Banking Company. The car park to its left was the former site of the town's first Market Hall, erected in 1879 and rebuilt after a fire in 1889; the latter survived until the Centenary Market was opened in 1971. Corporation Street itself dates only from 1913.
At the top of High Street, the frontage of John Mason Jewellers was extensively rebuilt in 1883, though the building itself is much older. John Mason was Mayor of Rotherham in 1888-89. The projecting clock on the front of the building replaces an earlier Victorian clock on the same site, and originally graced the front of the Daily Express building in Fleet Street. The impressive Royal Bank of Scotland building at the junction, built in 1892, is a fine example of Victorian architecture at its best, with its warm Huddersfield sandstone complemented by polished pillars of granite from Aberdeen. The building replaces an earlier one on the same site of which Edward Heseltine was manager from 1828 to 1856. On 11 June 1844 Heseltine's daughter Rose married the Victorian novelist Anthony Trollope in Rotherham Parish Church.
On the right hand side of Doncaster Gate, beyond the junction, is the elaborately turreted Doncaster Gate Hospital, opened in 1872 as Rotherham's first proper hospital. Beyond the traffic lights up the hill is Clifton Park, Rotherham's premier Victorian park. Previously in private ownership, the land was purchased by the Borough in 1891 after the death of its owner and opened to the public later that year. The opening ceremony was marred by an unfortunate incident when Councillor Charles managed to get his legs entangled in the ropes of a hot air balloon, and would have been carried upside down to Huddersfield had not his predicament been noticed by a bystander. Clifton House, the former 18th century home of the Walker family, was opened as the town's museum in 1893.
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