Birmingham known for his campaigns to repeal the Corn Laws as well as his opposition to slavery in the United States and the Crimean War. Touchstones Rochdale art gallery and local studies centre is across The Esplanade. Exterior and layout The frontage and principal entrance of the Town Hall face the River Roch, and comprises a portico of three arches intersected by buttresses. Decorating the main entrance are stone crockets, gargoyles, and finials. Four gilded lions above a parapet around three sides of the portico bear shields carrying the coats of arms of Rochdale Council and the hundred of Salford. Rochdale Town Hall is wide, deep, and is faced with millstone grit quarried from Blackstone Edge and Todmorden. Although now blackened by industrial pollution, the building has been described as a "rich example of domestic Gothic architecture". Naturalistic carved foliage on the exterior recalls the style of Southwell Minster, and the architecture is influenced by Perpendicular Period and medieval town halls of continental Europe. The building has been likened to Manchester Town Hall, Manchester Assize Courts, the Royal Courts of Justice, and St Pancras railway station, all products of the Gothic Revival architectural movement. The stained glass windows, some of which were designed by William Morris, have been described as "the finest modern examples of their kind". At each end of the frontage is an octagonal staircase. In the words of Nikolaus Pevsner, Rochdale Town Hall has "a splendidly craggy exterior of blackened stone". The building has a roughly symmetrical E-shaped plan, and is broken down into three self-contained segments: a central Great Hall and transverse wings at each end, which have variously been used as debating chambers, corporation-rooms, trade and a public hall. The south-east wing used to house the magistrates' courts, and the north-west wing the mayor's rooms. In the north-east is a tower. Access to the main entrance is through a central porte cochere. The façade extends across 14 bays, of which the Great Hall accounts for seven. On both sides, the outermost bays rise to three storeys. They flank asymmetric round-headed arcades—two to the left and three to the right, all of single-storey height—which sit below plain mullioned windows, balconies and ornately decorated gables. Clock tower The present clock tower, which has a stone spire, was built to replace the one destroyed in the 1883 fire. It was designed by Alfred Waterhouse in a similar style