The Light Restorers Episode 3: Gloucester Shire Hall

In this exciting transformation, workshop team, James and Rowan, undertake the restoration of a pair of large outdoor lanterns.

About Gloucester Shire Hall

Gloucester Shire Hall is a beautiful building with a rich history, and is the main meeting place for Gloucester County Council. Designed in the Greek revival style and first opened in 1816, the hall features four eye catching columns and was inspired by the temple on the river Ilisos in Greece.

The restoration process

The Fritz Fryer restoration team were approached to bring new life to some of the building’s incredible exterior antique lanterns. This large scale project required a team of experts that were dedicated to the preservation and restoration of antique lighting.

To ensure we would provide the best service, Gloucester Shire Hall requested to see previous large scale restoration projects, such as Cheltenham Town Hall & Pittville Pump Room  and The Grand Hotel Birmingham. A relationship was formed between ourselves and the Gloucester City Hall project leaders, which further helped them to entrust the large and important lanterns with our antique restoration team.

Head restorer James then visited the site to decipher how much work would need to be done to restore the substantial lanterns to their former beauty. One of the lanterns had already been taken down due to it being deemed unsafe – it was clear the team had a big project on their hands!

The lanterns were then dropped off at our Herefordshire studio. It was only once our team were able to get close to the lanterns that they realised the extent of the damage they had acquired over time. It became apparent, as our team began to disassemble the lights, that the internal structures were a lot more rotten than they were originally thought to be. The team would need to completely re-make the metal-work of the lanterns. The outside of the lanterns had succumb almost completely to rust, which would require the team to extensively sand down and polish the exterior, to reveal the the extraordinary copper look.

Completed, the lanterns are almost unrecognisable and will be returned to illuminate the Gloucester Shire Hall entrance for many more years to come.