The Old Exchange in Northgate Street, Chester was built between 1695 and 1698 and destroyed by fire on 30th December 1862.

Also known, at least in its early years, as the New Common Hall, the costs of its construction were shared between the town corporation, the King, William III, and a number of prominent local gentlemen. Its architect is unknown.

Built of brick with stone quions, its ground floor was originally an open piazza but, after sixty years, the building started to sag and was judged to be in imminent danger of collapse so the ground floor area was supported with strong pillars and the space between filled in with rows of small shops. The space was changed again in 1801-2 when the eminent Chester architect Thomas Harrison (builder of the Northgate and Grosvenor Bridge and rebuilder of the Castle) adapted it to accomodate courtrooms and offices.
The main apartments were on the upper floors; these housed a series of courts, assembly and banqueting rooms and a council chamber. They were described as "extremely ornamental, wainscotted with oak and adorned with figures of carved work".
A life-sized statue of Queen Anne in her coronation robes, "curiously gilt and painted" was added above the south front's entrance in 1712 and may clearly be seen in all of our illustrations.

The Exchange is shown above in an anonymous engraving and on the right in one of the earliest known photographs of Chester (or anywhere else for that matter) by Henry Fox-Talbot, the inventor of the negative-positive process, who visited the city in the 1840s. Our main illustration above gives a good impression of the bustle of the market which was held here for many centuries- alas no more- but the time necessary to expose Fox-Talbot's photograph meant that it failed to record all but a few ghostly images of the market traders and customers gathered around the Exchange.

Fifteen years later- and seven years before it was destroyed- the old Exchange was recorded in the remarkable aerial view below- a small detail from John McGahey's famous View of Chester from a Balloon in 1855. You can see it towards the top centre of the picture dominating a Market Square that is radically different from that we know today.
The Exchange is seen lengthways-on, showing it to have been a much grander structure than other surviving contemporary illustrations, which tended to show it as viewed from its southern end, would indicate. The narrowness of the street would doubtless have made it difficult for the artist to 'stand back' far enough to achieve a decent rendering of the building along its long side...

George Cuitt, writing in 1815, recorded that the statue of Queen Anne situated above the main entrance had been badly damaged- including the loss of the orb and sceptre she formerly held- as a result of being pelted with missiles by factions opposed to the Corporation during elections of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.
After the fire, the statue was moved to the Watertower from where it mysteriously vanished sometime in the 1950s- although the round-topped niche within which she stood still remains there.
One of the ornamental plaques situated on each side of the Queen now resides in the small garden of the Grosvenor Museum and a column from the building- removed a century before the fire, when pillars supporting one side of the Exchange were found to be weakening and replaced by the shops- was presented by the city to "the gentlemen of Abbey Square". It was duly erected on the green in the centre of the newly-built square, where it remains to this day.

The large Georgian house to the left of the Exchange (in the upper illustration) was the city residence of the Massey family of Moston- the site is now occupied by the Shropshire Arms public house and adjoining shop- and down the street may be seen the market building which replaced the unhygenic wooden stalls of the meat shambles. Beyond that is Folliot House, formerly the home of the great architect Thomas Harrison, which, together with Harrison's Northgate- seen in the distance- are the only structures in the illustration to remain standing to this day.
The Cathedral is seen as its was before its comprehensive restoration and its churchyard is still full of tombstones. The City Wall runs along the bottom of the picture, below which are the Kaleyards.

In 1862, a terrible fire destroyed the Exchange, but most of its valuable contents, including the city records and all but two large paintings were fortunately saved. After the fire, all trace of the old Exchange was obliterated; its site was cleared and an open space created which remains with us. Within two years, work started on its replacement, the great Town Hall we know today, designed by W H Lynn of Belfast, which was built in 1864-9, inspired by the medieval Cloth Hall in Ypres, Belgium. You can see a couple of photographs of it here.