B&W Challenge - Gold

Strange how lots of people can pass something every day and give it no attention whatsoever.

This plaque sits on one side of the door into the old Town Hall building. On the other side is a lovely inscribed foundation stone, which I guess most people also ignore, which says it was laid in October 1936 by Alderman Jackson.

The building - now Salford's Civic Centre - was completed in 1938 as the new Swinton and Pendlebury Town Hall at a cost of £80,000. In 1939 it won the Royal Institute of Architects (RIBA) gold award, which this plaque commemorates.the building was designed by Percy Thomas, a welsh architect, and bears an interesting resemblance to Swansea City Council's Guildhall which he also designed (it is bigger and faced in Portland stone).

Percy Thomas's name survived him through Percy Thomas Associates, who designed the rather wonderful Wales Millennium Centre in Cardiff. They went into administration in 2004, and were taken over by Capita.

The award of the gold medal was probably not the biggest news item in 1939, when the country had other things on its mind. But this probably looked a very modern building for the times. Just half a mile around the corner, up Station Rd, a 52 year old chap called Laurence Stephen Lowry lived with his mother, and away from his day job spent time in the attic painting scenes based on the industrial scene which dominated much of the area around his daily rounds. That wasn't news either in 1939, but would become more so as his reputation grew after the war.