Oxford Town Halls: Guildhall/Domus Conversorum
In 1292/3 the burgesses of Oxford built a Guildhall (with a frontage of 60 feet) on the north part of the site of the present Town Hall, running eastwards behind the properties on the south side of the High Street.
In 1550 the Council purchased a second property to the south of this, known as the “Domus Conversorum” and. H. E. Salter believes that the building acquired this name because it was “the house which is the property of the Converts at London” and not a place where converted Jews were maintained. It was known as the Blue Boar when the council bought it, and thereafter was described as the Lower Guildhall. It survived until 1750.
The drawing below (Historic England CC72/02336) shows this Domus Conversorum with its later extension:
The building below is and was presumably a later addition to the Town Hall in St Aldate's Street. It stood at the south end of the passage that runs down from the High to Blue Boar Street with Kemp Hall on the right. This engraving of the building was published in the Monthly Supplement of the Penny Magazine of the Society for the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge on 31 December 1835. It is described in the caption as “Old Town Hall”, and its gable is inscribed A.D. 1611:
The Jacobean overmantle shown below, which is now in the Lord Mayor's Parlour of the present Town Hall, was salvaged from the old parlour of the guildhall:
This early Town Hall had tenements and shops under it along St Aldate's Street.
The city council agreed on 15 October 1750 to replace both the upper and the lower Town Hall, and they were demolished in 1750. The 1611 building in Carter's Passage survived and appears to have been let out. It burnt down at Christmas 1834, and Jackson's Oxford Journalreported on 27 December that subscriptions were being collected to aid the current occupiers who had suffered in the fire.
Work on Oxford's second town hall (now in turn also replaced) was finished on 11 July 1752:
