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England – Great Britain
Lancashire – Preston Town Hall
1862 White Metal Medal 39.7mm (14.69 grams)
Reference: J. Moore
PRESTON TOWN HALL FOUNDATION STONE LAID 2ND SEPR 1862, Town Hall building.
PRESTON GUILD 1862 R. TOWNLEY PARKER ESQUIRE MAYOR, Coat-of-arms.
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 Preston Town Hall is a municipal building in Lancaster Road in Preston, Lancashire, England. The town hall, which is the headquarters of Preston City Council, is a Grade II listed building.
The first town hall was a medieval structure built on the south side of the Market Square which collapsed in June 1780. It was replaced by a second town hall which was a brick building built on the same site in 1782 and augmented by a cupola in 1814.
After significant industrial growth in the first half of the 19th century, particularly in relation to the cotton industry, civic leaders decided to procure a third town hall on the same site. The foundation stone for the new building was laid by the mayor, Robert Townley Parker, on 2 September 1862. It was designed by George Gilbert Scott in the Gothic style, built by Cooper and Tullis of Preston at a cost of £69,412 and was officially opened by the Duke of Cambridge on 3 October 1867. 6] The design involved arcading on the ground floor and tracery windows on the first floor and it featured a tower at the south west corner which was 197 feet (60 m) high.
As the responsibilities of the borough council increased, council leaders decided to procure a municipal office building to provide extra office space for council officers and their departments: the site selected was open ground in Lancaster Road between the police station to the north and the Sessions House to the south. The municipal office building, which was designed by Sir Arnold Thornely in the Neoclassical style was completed in 1934. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with eleven bays facing onto the Lancaster Road with the last three bays at each end slightly projected forward; the central section of five bays, which rose higher than the end sections, featured a doorway with an architrave and a pediment decorated with acroteria; in each of the sections the centre window on the first floor was equipped with a balcony.
As part of a two-day visit to Lancashire, King George VI and Queen Elizabeth attended a lunch hosted by the Lord Lieutenant of Lancashire, Lord Derby, at County Hall before meeting civic leaders at the town hall in March 1945 during the Second World War.
The town hall burnt down on 15 March 1947 and was subsequently demolished and a modern building known as Crystal House was built on the site in 1962. A council chamber was created in the municipal office building which was renamed the Preston Town Hall in 1971. The new town hall continued to be the local seat of government after the enlarged Preston District Council was formed in 1974 and remained its home after the local authority secured city status as Preston City Council in 2002.
 Caroline of Brunswick (Caroline Amelia Elizabeth; 17 May 1768 – 7 August 1821) was Queen consort of the United Kingdom as the wife of King George IV from 29 January 1820 until her death in 1821. She was the Princess of Wales from 1795 to 1820.
The daughter of Charles William Ferdinand, Duke of Brunswick, and Princess Augusta of Great Britain, Caroline was engaged to her first cousin, George, in 1794 despite the two of them never having met. He was already illegally married to Maria Fitzherbert. George and Caroline married the following year but separated shortly after the birth of their only child, Princess Charlotte of Wales, in 1796. By 1806, rumours that Caroline had taken lovers and had an illegitimate child led to an investigation into her private life. The dignitaries who led the investigation concluded that there was “no foundation” to the rumours, but Caroline’s access to her daughter was nonetheless restricted. In 1814, Caroline moved to Italy, where she employed Bartolomeo Pergami as a servant. Pergami soon became Caroline’s closest companion, and it was widely assumed that they were lovers. In 1817, Caroline was devastated when Charlotte died in childbirth. She heard the news from a passing courier as George had refused to write and tell her. He was determined to divorce Caroline, and set up a second investigation to collect evidence of her adultery.
In 1820, George became King of the United Kingdom and Hanover. He hated his wife, vowed she would never be the queen, and insisted on a divorce, which she refused. A legal divorce was possible but difficult to obtain. Caroline returned to Britain to assert her position as queen. She was wildly popular with the British populace, who sympathised with her and despised the new king for his immoral behaviour. On the basis of the loose evidence collected against her, George attempted to divorce her by introducing the Pains and Penalties Bill to Parliament, but he and the bill were so unpopular, and Caroline so popular with the masses, that it was withdrawn by the Liverpool government. In July 1821, Caroline was barred from the coronation on the orders of her husband. She fell ill in London and died three weeks later. Her funeral procession passed through London on its way to her native Brunswick, where she was buried.
 Middlesex (abbreviation: Middx) is an historic county in southeast England. It is now entirely within the wider urbanised area of London. Its area is now also mostly within the ceremonial county of Greater London, with small sections in other neighbouring ceremonial counties. It was established in the Anglo-Saxon system from the territory of the Middle Saxons, and existed as an official unit until 1965. The historic county includes land stretching north of the River Thames from 3 miles (5 km) east to 17 miles (27 km) west of the City of London with the rivers Colne and Lea and a ridge of hills as the other boundaries. The largely low-lying county, dominated by clay in its north and alluvium on gravel in its south, was the second smallest county by area in 1831.
The City of London was a county in its own right from the 12th century and was able to exert political control over Middlesex. Westminster Abbey dominated most of the early financial, judicial and ecclesiastical aspects of the county. As London grew into Middlesex, the Corporation of London resisted attempts to expand the city boundaries into the county, which posed problems for the administration of local government and justice. In the 18th and 19th centuries the population density was especially high in the southeast of the county, including the East End and West End of London. From 1855 the southeast was administered, with sections of Kent and Surrey, as part of the area of the Metropolitan Board of Works. When county councils were introduced in England in 1889 about 20% of the area of Middlesex, along with a third of its population, was transferred to the new County of London and the remainder became an administrative county governed by the Middlesex County Council that met regularly at the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster, in the County of London. The City of London, and Middlesex, became separate counties for other purposes and Middlesex regained the right to appoint its own sheriff, lost in 1199.
 In the interwar years suburban London expanded further, with improvement and expansion of public transport, and the setting up of new industries. After the Second World War, the population of the County of London and inner Middlesex was in steady decline, with high population growth continuing in the outer parts. After a Royal Commission on Local Government in Greater London, almost all of the original area was incorporated into an enlarged Greater London in 1965, with the rest transferred to neighbouring counties. Since 1965 various areas called Middlesex have been used for cricket and other sports. Middlesex was the former postal county of 25 post towns.
Conder Tokens, also known as 18th Century Provincial Tokens, are a form of privately minted token coinage struck and used during the latter part of the 18th Century and the early part of the 19th Century in England, Anglesey and Wales, Scotland, and Ireland.
The driving force behind the need for token coinage was the shortage of small denomination coins for everyday transactions. However, the demand was fueled by other factors such as the Industrial Revolution, population growth, and the preponderance of counterfeit circulating coins. Because the government made little effort to ameliorate this shortage, private business owners and merchants took matters into their own hands, and the first tokens of this type were issued in 1787 to pay workers at the Parys Mine Company. By 1795, millions of tokens of a few thousand varying designs had been struck and were in common use throughout Great Britain.
Collecting Conder tokens has been popular since shortly after they were first manufactured, resulting in the availability today of many highly preserved examples for collectors. The demarcation of what is or is not considered a Conder token is somewhat unclear; however, most collectors consider Conder tokens to include those indexed originally by James Conder or later by Dalton & Hamer.
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