Buildings

Launceston Mechanics' Institute Buildings

Earlier temporary premises

The first two meetings were held at the Frederick St Infants’ schoolroom on 2 March & 26 April 1842

The first ‘home of our first institute’ was a room in a public school in Cameron St attached to Holy Trinity Church where general meetings & other institute activities were held until October 1843. It was open three evenings/week and continued to be used for lectures until 1849.

Elizabeth St schoolroom attached to St John’s Church:

The room was offered by Rev. Dr Browne when the institute was required to quit the Cameron St premises; It was used from 10 October 1843 to March 1844.

The Government granted a block of land in Wellington Street for an institute building in October 1843.

A building 23 feet  by 15 feet was erected by Alexander Kidd in St John Street (‘adjoining his cabinet manufactory’) as a reading room & library for the institute.  It was occupied from March 1844 until the permanent building was occupied in 1860, initially for a rent of £30 p.a.

The Institute Board offered to trade the Wellington Street land for a block in St John Street, and eventually the Government granted land at the corner of Cameron and St John streets on 27 January 1846.

Lectures and larger events held in the Temperance Hall and Assembly Rooms from 1849.

After lengthy discussion which began in 1843 about a permanent building and continued for over a decade with little money raised, in 1856 strenuous efforts led to a substantial sum being accumulated, and tenders were called for a grand, purpose-built edifice designed by W H Clayton. G R Russell’s tender for £5370 was accepted; the foundation stone was laid in June 1857 on the institute’s land on the corner of Cameron and St John streets.

The new Launceston Mechanics' Institute Building in 1861. 

A detail from a stereograph by Alfred Abbott.

Permanent premises

The Launceston Mechanics’ Institute building was opened 9 April 1860 by the president, Dr Casey. It was Italianate in design, 60 feet long fronting Cameron Street by 70 feet along St John Street, and 45 feet high with two storeys. It featured a reading room, a library, a classroom, a museum and a lecture room on the ground floor, and a laboratory and a lecture hall capable of holding an audience of 700 on the first floor.

Launceston Council sold land adjoining the Institute to the Institute Board in 1869, and in 1870 quarters for the librarian were erected there.

The Librarian’s quarters were pulled down in 1884 to allow for the expansion of the main building with a new committee room downstairs, the museum moved upstairs and enlargement of caretaker’s quarters. The new building opened in September1885.

The Queen Victoria Museum and Art Gallery began construction in 1887 and the Institute’s paintings & exhibits were transferred to it by 1891. The upstairs space left vacant became the free reading room and repository of the Launceston Library Society’s collection which passed to the Institute in 1889.

Tenders were called for a major redevelopment of the Institute in Feb 1907 because of lack of space and poor condition of the building. Renovations concluded in Feb 1909: the Cameron Street front now uniform in style, a new section three storeys high topped with a dome, the Librarian’s rooms in the top storey, and toilets and other facilities modernised (The building continued in this form during the period in which the name of the institute was changed to Launceston Public Library.)

A 1941 postcard of the Institute building

Renovations to modernise the building and its facilities were undertaken in 1944-45 to establish it as a free public library; the holdings of the institute were transferred from the Launceston Library Board to the Launceston City Corporation and administration passed to the State Library.

In the 1960s with such a large use of library services and the building being in a bad state of repair,

In 1964 Council accepted  a Government proposal to establish a northern regional library under the control of the State Library Board and granted land for the construction of a new building next to the Institute site.

In 1971 the old Mechanics’ Institute building was demolished and the new Northern Regional Library building opened.