[4] The building was designed by Henry Ward of Stafford in the Gothic style, built with red brick and stone dressings and was officially opened on 20 June 1877.

[1] The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with nine bays facing onto Eastgate Street; the central bay, which slightly projected forward, featured an arched doorway on the ground floor, a stone balcony and four-light tracery window on the first floor and a gable containing two quatrefoils and a wheel window.

[3][6] In the early 1880s, the reading room on the ground floor of Borough Hall was expanded to incorporate a library and a museum: the latter contained a collection of ethnographic, zoological and geological exhibits established by the meteorologist, Clement Lindley Wragge, before he moved to Australia in 1883.

[11][12] Borough Hall ceased to be the local seat of government when the new civic offices were completed on the site of the old Royal Brine Baths in Riverside in 1978.

[13][14] The borough hall was subsequently refurbished and converted for use as an entertainment venue: it was officially re-opened by the Duke of Gloucester as the Gatehouse Theatre on 27 January 1982.