Open House London 2019: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

My second post marking Open House London 2019 offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – on the weekend of 21-22 September. (Open House venues are picked out in bold with links to their web page; the links in bold blue relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall © Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

Old Vestry Offices, Enfield © Philafrenzy and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The Old Vestry Offices in Enfield, a small polygonal building built in 1829, originally housed the local beadle – responsible for local enforcement of the Poor Law – and then, until the 1930s, a police station.

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services principally related to public health and safety.  London’s first city-wide administration was created in 1855 in the Metropolitan Board of Works.  This was initially a body of 45 members, elected indirectly by 43 London districts: the Vestry in 29 of the larger parishes and 12 District Boards of Works in which smaller parishes were combined (plus special bodies in the City and Woolwich if you’re counting).

Limehouse District Board of Works, now the Half Moon Theatre

The Limehouse District Board of Works built headquarters on White Horse Road in Ratcliff.  The building, erected between 1862 and 1864, was designed by the Board’s surveyor, CR Dunch – a ‘liberal interpretation of Italian Renaissance’ according to Pevsner.

Within four years the Board was grappling with one of the latest and largest of the cholera outbreaks to afflict London in this period – its sound advice to locals to avoid drinking potentially unsafe water availing little against the terrible sanitary conditions of the area.

Appropriately, after 1900 the building would house the Borough of Stepney’s Public Health Department.  In 1994, it became the home of the Half Moon Theatre, committed to giving ‘young people an opportunity to experience the best in young people’s theatre’.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too. After a long period of decline, the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

Old Hampstead Town Hall

Old Hampstead Town Hall was, in inception, another vestry hall – designed by HE Kendall and Frederick Mew in Italianate style and claimed as ‘a decided ornament to that part of Haverstock Hill’ by the local press when opened in 1878. The Metropolitan Board of Works was abolished in 1889 and replaced by the London County Council. London Metropolitan Boroughs were established in 1900.  The building became the headquarters of the new Metropolitan Borough of Hampstead and was extended in 1910.

Limehouse Town Hall

Another building to undergo this transformation was Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881 and designed in Italian palazzo style by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston as  ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  The vestry hall  became the offices of Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation into Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital. Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, built to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country. Some further images here.

Lambeth Town Hall

Lambeth Town Hall can’t compete with that but it’s a fine building, also Edwardian Baroque, whose redbrick and Portland stone facades are capped by an imposing corner tower. It was the work of Septimus Warwick and Austen Hall, and was opened on 29 April 1908 by the then Prince and Princess of Wales. Its dignified council chamber and some lavish interior rooms remain impressive.

Bethnal Green Town Hall, now the Town Hall Hotel and Apartments

Bethnal Green Town Hall, now a hotel, was opened in 1910 to Edwardian Baroque designs by Percy Robinson and W Alban Jones.  Sculptures by Henry Poole adorn the exterior.  The growth of local government responsibilities in the interwar period compelled the opening of a large extension to the rear, designed by ECP Monson – restrained neo-classical outside, sumptuous and modern inside – in 1939.  (Monson was also a significant architect of the era’s council housing such as the briefly notorious Lenin Estate built in the 1920s when the Council was briefly under joint Labour-Communist control.)

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall © Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style and opened in 1913.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

Islington Town Hall © Alan Ford and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Islington Town Hall, opened in 1925, takes us into the heyday of local government as councils assumed ever greater powers and purpose. It was designed by ECP Monson again. Its neo-classical style has been described as old-fashioned for its time but it’s finely executed.

Kingston Guildhall, 1935 © Kingston History Centre

Kingston Guildhall was opened in 1935, designed for the Royal Borough of Kingsto-upon-Thames by Maurice Webb in contemporary neo-Georgian style though, more unusually in red brick with dressings in Portland stone. Two extensions were added in the 1970s and 1980s after the creation of the new London Borough of Kingston-upon-Thames and its incorporation into the area of the Greater London Council.

Hackney Town Hall

Hackney Town Hall, designed by Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge, is also formally neo-classical but its lines and styling are sleeker, more modern and, internally it’s a masterpiece of Art Deco.  The Town Hall was formally opened in 1937 by Lord Snell, Labour Leader of the House of the Lords, he described it as a building:

devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all…It represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living…a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

London City Hall © Garry Knight and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to the latest iteration of London local government.  Mrs Thatcher abolished the Greater London Council in 1985; the The new Greater London Authority  was established in 2000. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened two years later – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

Open House London, 2019: A Tour of the Capital’s Council Housing

The most important buildings in London – those with the greatest social significance for the mass of its people and those which have made the greatest visual impact on the capital – are council houses. In 1981, at peak, there were 769,996 council homes in the capital and they housed near 31 percent of its population.

It’s partly this ubiquity and familiarity – and the fact, of course, that most council housing is happily ‘ordinary’ – that explains why few council estates make it into Open House London, the annual celebration of built heritage taking place this year on the weekend of the 21-22 September.

Open House itself has, to put it kindly, an ambivalent relationship to social housing. It features, as we will see, genuine celebrations of council housing’s past and present but too often controversial regeneration schemes are showcased with no reference to the disruption of established communities and the loss of social rent homes they entail.

This post offers a chronological tour of the Open House London venues which do mark council housing’s progressive history and present necessity.  This year, the Open House locations will be picked out in bold with the relevant link to the venue’s webpage and I’ll add links (in bold blue), where possible, to past blog posts which provide further information.

We’ll begin, however, with a brief reference to some of the early garden suburbs which, while overwhelmingly middle-class in character, did provide a model for later council schemes.

Brentham Garden Suburb

The bohemian Bedford Park Estate, begun in 1875, might be described as the first cottage suburb.  Gidea Park, promoted by several Liberal MPs (including Sir Tudor Walters of the famous wartime report on post-war housing) from 1897, is notable for the architectural contribution of a number of architects who would go on to design council schemes including Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin.  The latter were the chief architects of the Brentham Garden Suburb in 1910 – important as a co-partnership scheme intended to cater for at least the more affluent of the working class.

Hampstead Garden Suburb, founded in 1906 by Henrietta Barnett, was intended as a mixed community though it rapidly – given the quality of its design and build and relatively high rents – became a rather select middle-class enclave. Unwin and Parker were again key figures and the guided walk offered focuses on the Suburb’s ‘Artisan Quarter’.

Tower Gardens Estate

Turning to council housing proper, it’s good to see Tower Gardens (or the White Hart Lane Estate) featured – designed and built by the London County Council (LCC) before the First World War: a cottage estate for working people inspired by the Garden City and Arts and Crafts movements of the day.  Just under 1000 homes were built on the Estate before the war halted construction; a further 1266 houses and flats were added – in plainer style but in keeping with Garden City ideals – in a northwards extension to the Estate between the wars.

Roe Green Village

Roe Green Village wasn’t a council scheme – it was designed by Frank Baines in 1916, chief architect of the Office of Works, as housing for workers engaged in First World War armaments production.  He had earlier designed the exemplary Well Hall Estate in Eltham for the same purpose. Both provided important inspiration for the ‘Homes for Heroes’ and council estates which emerged at the end of the war.

The Becontree Estate

In terms of size and ambition, there was no more important such estate than Becontree in east London.  The LCC built 89,049 council homes in the capital between the wars; some 26,000 of these in the Becontree Estate in Dagenham, first mooted in 1919. It was the largest of the LCC’s interwar estates, housing by 1939 a population of 120,000.  Such size (and an unpromising site) led some – despite the planners’ best efforts – to criticise the mass and uniformity of the Estate but to many, moving from inner-city slums, ‘it was heaven with the gates off.’  Take the opportunity, if you go, to visit the Valence House Museum which contains interesting exhibits on the estate.

An early photograph of the Fellowship Inn

The Bellingham Estate in south London was another large interwar LCC estate with over 2000 homes and a population of 12,000, largely complete by 1923.  The Fellowship Inn, now repurposed as a community venue including bar, cinema and café by Phoenix Community Housing, is an interesting example of the ‘improved public house’ that the Council hoped would ‘improve’ council house tenants.

Eastbury Manor and estate

It’s a stretch to include 16^th century Eastbury Manor House in this listing but I’m fond of it and it has a rich municipal history amongst other things. It’s incongruously but delightfully situated plumb in the middle of another interwar council estate.

Cass House, the Gascoyne Estate

The guided walk I’m leading which starts at the 1948 Gascoyne Estate (yet another LCC scheme in inception) takes in other similar interwar tenement blocks as well as some representative modernist high-rise. Vaine House and Granard House on Gascoyne II were inspired by Le Corbusier’s Unité d’Habitation and would provide a model for the more famous Alton West scheme.  It’s an eclectic mix and the walk sets out to illustrate a tapestry of London’s council housing over the years rather than present any of its better-know showpieces. (Please note numbers are strictly limited.)

Acton Gardens Estate

The Acton Gardens Estate was formerly known as the South Acton Estate or even (as a reference to a local laundry industry) ‘Soapsud Island’.  Begun under a post-war slum clearance and redevelopment programme in 1949 and built over 30 years, South Acton became, with almost 2100 homes, one of the largest council estates in west London and it reflected that history in its range of housing and, in particular, the high-rise blocks that emerged from the later 1950s. It became a ‘problem estate’ and comprehensive regeneration was planned from 1996; the 21-storey Barrie Tower was demolished in 2001. You’re invited to admire the very significant changes that have taken place in the design and form of the estate since then and perhaps rightly so but it’s worth noting that the new estate contains 900 fewer affordable homes than its predecessor. (1)

Golden Lane Estate

The Golden Lane Estate, inaugurated in 1950 and designed for the City of London by Powell, Chamberlin and Bon (who went on to design the neighbouring Barbican), is rightly celebrated for the innovative thinking and architecture which provided a model for the best of post-war council housing, particularly in the facilities intended to sustain ‘community’ and create ‘neighbourhood’ in an urban setting.  Note that current plans to ‘densify’ the estate are opposed by many residents.

Balfron Tower

The fight to save Balfron Tower is already lost. Designed by Ernő Goldfinger for the Greater London Council in 1968, Balfron is famous (or infamous according to taste) as one of the most imposing Brutalist designs of its time but it was, first and foremost, housing for working-class people being moved from local slums. Now the Grade II-listed block’s flats are in the hands of property developers Londonewcastle and being marketed to the affluent and hip middle classes. Visit Balfron Tower by all means but please don’t disregard this betrayal of the social purpose that built it.

Trellick Tower

Fortunately, Balfron’s younger sister, Trellick Tower, opened in 1972, remains – despite the depredations of Right to Buy – in council ownership.

The World’s End Estate

Another landmark estate, this one created by the Borough of Kensington and Chelsea in happier times is the World’s End Estate. It’s an estate set on the banks of the Thames, completed in 1977 when the working class were still permitted river views.  Designed by Eric Lyons and HT (‘Jim’) Cadbury-Brown, in plain terms World’s End comprises seven 18 to 21-storey tower blocks, joined in a figure of eight by nine four-storey walkway blocks but the whole, clad in warm-red brick, possesses a romantic, castellated appearance, providing  great views within and without.

Cressingham Gardens

In some respects, World’s End marked the end of an era of large, high-rise construction. As Chief Architect for the new (post-65) Borough of Lambeth, Ted Hollamby had concluded that ‘people do not desperately desire to be housed in large estates, no matter how imaginative the design and convenient the dwellings’.  Hollamby believed that ‘most people like fairly small-scale and visually comprehensible environments.  They call them villages, even when they are manifestly not’.  His vision can be seen enacted in the Cressingham Gardens Estate.

Cressingham Gardens was described in 1981 by Lord Esher, president of RIBA, as ‘warm and informal…one of the nicest small schemes in England’. It’s a beautiful estate nestling on the edge of Brockwell Park which manages superbly, in Hollamby’s words again, to ‘create a sense of smallness inside the bigness…and to get the kind of atmosphere in which people did not feel all herded together’.

It’s a well-loved estate with a strong sense of community. Unfortunately, as part of Lambeth’s commendable pledge to build new homes at council rent in the borough, it has become another victim of ‘regeneration’; in actual fact, the threat of demolition.

The principal driver of this policy in London is money or the lack of it – the pressure to sell council real estate and build private housing for sale in order to raise capital for social housing at best or so-called ‘affordable’ housing at worst.  A second is ‘densification’ – a belief that working-class homes must be built at greater density to accommodate the capital’s growing population.  Not all regeneration is bad but where it means the destruction of good homes and the wiping out of existing communities it should be opposed.

Central Hill

A second signature Hollamby estate, also featured in Open House this year, is Central Hill in Upper Norwood, completed in 1973. It’s a stepped development designed to make best use of its attractive site but it reflects Lambeth and Hollamby’s signature style in its intimacy and human scale. It too is threatened with demolition. The residents of both estates have active campaigns fighting to preserve their homes and communities.  See Save Central Hill and Save Cressingham Gardens to find out more and lend your support.

West Kensington and Gibbs Green

West Ken and Gibbs Green are two neighbouring estates of 760 homes in total in Hammersmith (built in 1974 and 1961 respectively) which have been fighting against demolition as part of a massive commercially-led redevelopment scheme since 2009. Residents are now campaigning to form a community-owned housing association which can protect their homes and community. As importantly, their ‘People’s Plan’ (created in collaboration with Architects for Social Housing) shows that necessary regeneration can be achieved not only without the loss of social housing but with its expansion – in this case, with 250 new homes built for sale on the open market to pay for the estate upgrades and seventy new social rented homes.  Visit the residents’ website West Ken and Gibbs Green – the People’s Estates for further information.

An early photograph of Thamesmead

Thamesmead on the south bank of the Thames Estuary represented planning and construction in an earlier era of high ambition. A gleam in the eye of the LCC from the fifties and then, from 1966, the Greater London Council’s ‘Woolwich-Erith Project’, it was envisaged as a ‘town of the 21st Century’ with a population of between 60- to 100,000 people. Only 12,000 had settled by 1974 and the estate – with its difficult location, poor transport links and lack of facilities – was considered by many a failure. Taken over by Peabody in 2015, benefiting from new investment and the now delayed arrival of Crossrail in 2019, it’s on the up now and worth visiting for both its past and future promise. The tour, led by the Twentieth Century Society, will allow you to visit some of the highlights of the original architecture of the GLC 1968 masterplan, some of which sadly are now under threat.

The Brunswick Centre

From the late 1960s, a new era began in council housing design as discredited tower blocks were replaced by new forms of low-rise, high density housing.  The Brunswick Centre, completed in 1972, was originally planned as a private development. Due to financial difficulties, the residential section was leased to the London Borough of Camden for use as council housing while the developer retained ownership of the structure and shopping areas.

Stoneleigh Terrace, the Whittington Estate

Though not a Camden scheme as such, the Centre fits well with what became the celebrated signature style of Camden Borough Council into the 1970s. This can be seen firstly in the Whittington Estate, begun in 1969, designed by Peter Tábori, a young architect then in his mid-twenties. It’s a scheme in typical Camden style, six parallel linear stepped-section blocks of light pre-cast concrete construction and dark-stained timber.  It was designed to be a ‘form of housing…which related more closely to the existing urban fabric than the slab and tower blocks, and which brought more dwellings close to the ground’. Each home had its own front door and a walk through the front door of 8 Stoneleigh Terrace during Open House will allow you to glimpse the innovative interior design of the housing too, chiefly the work of Ken Adie of the Council’s Department of Technical Services.

Alexandra Road

Another Camden scheme is widely judged to be one of the most attractive and architecturally accomplished council estates in the country, Alexandra Road, listed Grade II* in 1993.  The Alexandra and Ainsworth Estate was the work of Neave Brown, awarded the Royal Gold Medal of the Royal Institute of British Architects in October 2017. He sadly died three months later. The estate is better seen than described but, in its scale and confidence, it marks (in the words of modernist architect John Winter), ‘a magical moment for English housing’.

The Page High Estate

Despite knowing the area pretty well, I have to confess the Page High Estate in Wood Green was new to me.  It’s social housing, designed for a consortium consisting of Haringey Council, Sainsbury, Woolworth’s and World of Housing Property Trust (later Sanctuary Housing) by the Dry Halasz Dixon Partnership in 1975.  To be fair, the estate is easy to miss – built six and seven storeys above the ground on top of a car park and store. The Tenants’ Association offering the tour was set up in 2017 to improve repairs and maintenance and campaign for the improvement of the estate. Please support them.

Dujardin Mews with the Alma Estate to the read

Finally, we come to post-1979 schemes and all of you reading this will understand the changed world that council housing – social housing as we must now call it – has inhabited since that date.  Dujardin Mews in Ponders End is an Enfield Council scheme designed by Karakusevic Carson Architects. The first phase, completed in 2018 is lovely and multiple award-winning while the scheme as a whole is part of the larger Alma Estate regeneration.  Despite researching assiduously, I’ve not discovered the tenure details of Dujardin Mews (I will amend or add to this if anyone can tell me) but the larger scheme offers the usual mix of ‘affordable’, shared ownership and properties for sale – an increase in homes and a net loss of social rent homes.

The Kings Crescent Estate

The Kings Crescent Estate was originally built by Hackney Council in 1969. The estate’s two nineteen-storey tower blocks were demolished in 2000 and 2002 alongside some of the lower blocks, around 357 homes in all.  The current regeneration scheme creates 273 new homes overall but of these only 76 are social rented; a further 101 social rent homes will be refurbished. It is a further reminder of the twisted economics of current social housing finance.

I’m sorry not to be more positive. There is a small uptick in council housebuilding. Councils are being allowed to borrow and many new schemes are underway but, almost invariably, they are small-scale and financed – through both necessity and choice – through public-private partnerships which too frequently prioritise non-social rented homes. The contemporary picture of social housing’s marginalisation and market-driven ‘regeneration’ creates a poignant counterpoint to the energy and aspirations of previous generations.  If you visit any of the estates on show during Open House London, my plea to you is to think of them not as monuments to a bygone era but as exemplars of what we can and should achieve in a brighter future.

Notes

(1) For further detail on the South Acton Estate, read the excellent chapter by Peter Guillery in Guillerry and Kroll (eds), Mobilising Housing Histories: Learning from London’s Past (RIBA Publishing, 2017)

Open House London 2018: Town Halls – Civic Pride and Service

My first post marking Open House London 2018 offers a broadly chronological, whistle-stop tour of the municipal seats of government featured, in various forms – some grand, some humble – on the weekend of 22-23 September. (Open House venues are picked out in bold; the links relate to previous blog posts.)

City of London Guildhall © Prioryman and made available through Wikimedia Commons

It’s appropriate then to begin with the oldest and one of the most impressive of these, the City of London Guildhall and its present Grand Hall, begun in 1411 – the third largest surviving medieval hall in the country.  Externally, it’s probably the 1788 grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in – with apologies to contemporary sensibilities – what’s been called Hindoostani Gothic that is most eye-catching.  The adjacent Guildhall Library and Art Gallery are also open to view – great facilities along with others provided the City but, as the Corporation is hardly a triumph of democracy, we’ll move on.

Vestry House Museum, Walthamstow

At the other end of the scale what is now the Vestry House Museum in Walthamstow is a modest affair.  It started life in the mid-18^th century as a workhouse but included a room set aside for meetings of the local vestry.  It was later adapted as a police station before becoming a very fine local museum in 1930. If you can’t make Open House, do visit it and Walthamstow Village at another time.

Old Vestry Offices, Enfield © Philafrenzy and made available through Wikimedia Commons

The Old Vestry Offices in Enfield, a small polygonal building built in 1829, originally housed the local beadle – responsible for local enforcement of the Poor Law – and then, until the 1930s, a police station.

This was an era of minimal – so-called night-watchman – local government when ad hoc, largely unrepresentative bodies administered basic services largely related to public safety.  As towns grew and expectations – initially focused on health and, increasingly, on housing – increased, the more ambitious vestries took on enhanced roles and garnered greater prestige.  One such was Shoreditch.

Shoreditch Town Hall

Shoreditch Town Hall almost matches the Guildhall in its civic pretensions – chutzpah indeed for a building, designed by the impressively named Caesar Augustus Long and opened in 1866 for a vestry. But Shoreditch Vestry took particular pride in its path-breaking municipal electricity undertaking and here its motto, and that of the later Borough, ‘More Light, More Power’ took on more than merely metaphorical meaning.  You might recognise the figure of ‘Progress’ enshrined in the Town Hall tower too. After a long period of decline, the Town Hall was reopened in 2005 and is now a thriving community venue operated by the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust.

Limehouse Town Hall

Limehouse Town Hall, opened in 1881, is a humbler building despite the Italian palazzo styling adopted by local architects Arthur and Christopher Harston. It also started life as a Vestry Hall but one intended nevertheless as ‘a structure that…shall do honour to the parish of Limehouse’.  It went on to serve as offices for Stepney Metropolitan Borough Council – while its great hall hosted balls and concerts and even early ‘cinematograph’ shows.  It was well known to Clement Attlee, mayor of Stepney in 1919 and later the area’s MP.  It’s been run by the Limehouse Town Hall Consortium Trust as a community venue since 2004.

Ealing Town Hall © PG Chamion and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Ealing had a local board of health from 1863 and didn’t become an urban district until 1894 under the Local Government Act of that year.  Ealing Town Hall, a grand neo-Gothic building, designed by Charles Jones and opened in 1888, replaced a smaller town hall (still standing, now a bank on The Mall) built just fourteen years earlier but now deemed too small for purpose.  The newer town hall was itself extended in the 1930s and includes an impressive double-height council chamber.

Battersea Arts Centre

Battersea Town Hall, begun in 1892 – an ‘Elizabethan Renaissance’ design by Edward Mountford – survived a disastrous fire in 2015.  Fortunately, repairs and renovations have re-established what is now the Battersea Arts Centre as a wonderful local resource.  In fact, the grand scheme – building but adapting innovatively and excitingly  on its past – has been just been completed and is well worth a visit.

Its local government heritage survives, however – a worthy memorial to the time when Battersea’s radical politics earned it the title, the ‘Municipal Mecca’. For more images of the town hall, visit my Tumblr post here. (The Latchmere Estate, a fifteen minute walk to the north and the subject of my very first post, was the first council estate in Britain to be built by direct labour in 1903.)

Richmond Old Town Hall

Richmond, a municipal borough founded in 1890 in the County of Surrey, was a more conservative body although it can boast (since its incorporation into Greater London in 1965) the first council housing built in the capital. Richmond Old Town Hall, also designed in Elizabethan Renaissance style by WJ Ancell, was opened in 1893 and now houses (since the creation of the London Borough of Richmond) a museum, gallery and local studies archives amongst other things.

Finsbury Town Hall

Finsbury Town Hall was opened in 1895, another Vestry Hall at that time, designed by C Evans Vaughan in ‘free Flemish Renaissance’ style according to Pevsner.  Look out for the Art Nouveau entrance canopy and internal fittings too.  It’s a beautiful building making good use of a tricky site, subsequently home to one of the most radical of London’s Metropolitan Borough Councils.  Nearby, you can visit the headquarters of the Metropolitan Water Board, opened in 1920, just up the road at New River Head.

Back to Finsbury Town Hall, it’s been the home of the Urdang Academy – a school of dance and musical theatre – since 2006 and, in its words, ‘an inspiring and fitting environment in which to train’.  The Town Hall is still a local registry office for weddings and, for that reason, close to my heart and that of the woman who puts the ‘dreams’ into ‘municipal’.

Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower

Croydon, created a County Borough within Surrey in 1889, didn’t amalgamate with London until 1965 but the Town Hall, built to plans by local architect Charles Henman, was opened in 1896 to provide ‘Municipal Offices, Courts, a Police Station, Library and many other public purposes’. The Croydon Town Hall and Clocktower complex retains some local government functions – the Mayor’s Parlour and committee rooms – but also offers a museum, gallery, library and cinema.

Tottenham Town Hall, fire station and public baths illustrated in 1903

Tottenham Town Hall today

A visit to the Tottenham Green Conservation Area gives you an opportunity view a whole slew of historically significant buildings.  With my municipal hat on, I’ll draw your attention to Tottenham Town Hall (HQ of Tottenham Urban District Council from 1904 to 1965) and the other examples of local government endeavour and service adjacent – the public baths next door (now just the façade remaining but, as the Bernie Grants Art Centre supported by Haringey Council, still serving a progressive purpose), the fire station (now an enterprise centre), and technical college (built by Middlesex County Council). Passing the new Marcus Garvie Library, you’ll come across Tottenham’s former public library built in 1896 just up the road.  It’s as fine an ensemble of civic purpose and social betterment as you could find in the country. Some further images here.

The Victoria Hall, Woolwich Town Hall

And without doubt, Woolwich Town Hall, an elaborate Baroque design by Alfred Brumwell Thomas, is one of the most impressive town halls in the capital.  You’ll find more images of the town hall in this Tumblr post. Queen Victoria presides over the main stairway of the building’s staggeringly impressive central lobby but the building was opened, following Labour’s capture of the Metropolitan Borough Council in 1903 by local MP and dockers’ leader Will Crooks.  That take-over by one of the largest and most active Labour organisations in the country (don’t neglect the Royal Arsenal Cooperative Society here) heralded a proud era of reform to raise the health and living standards of the local working class.

Lambeth Town Hall

Lambeth Town Hall can’t compete with that but it’s a fine building, also Edwardian Baroque, whose redbrick and Portland stone facades are capped by an imposing corner tower. It was the work of Septimus Warwick and Austen Hall, and was opened on 29 April 1908 by the then Prince and Princess of Wales. Its dignified council chamber and some lavish interior rooms remain impressive.

The UK Supreme Court, formerly Middlesex Guildhall © Pam Fray and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Moving to the immediate pre-war period, the Middlesex Guildhall in Westminster – originally housing, amongst other things, the offices of Middlesex County Council – was an unusual building for its time, designed by Scottish architect James Gibson in free Gothic style.  It was sympathetically adapted in 2009 to serve as the headquarters of the UK Supreme Court.

Islington Town Hall © Alan Ford and made available through Wikimedia Commons

Islington Town Hall, opened in 1925, takes us into the heyday of local government as councils assumed ever greater powers and purpose. It was designed by ECP Monson again. Its neo-classical style has been described as old-fashioned for its time but it’s finely executed.

Hornsey Town Hall

Conversely, Hornsey Town Hall, completed a decade later, captures stylish modernity in full flow and has been dubbed ‘the quintessential English modern public building of the decade’. It was designed by the 27-year old New Zealander Reginald Uren but owes much to the Dutch and Swedish influences of Willem Marinus Dudok’s Hilversum Town Hall and  Ragnar Östberg’s Stockholm Town Hall. (Dudok was also a direct influence of Clifford Culpin’s Greenwich Town Hall opened in 1938.)

The Town Hall lost its principal role when Hornsey was absorbed into the new London Borough of Haringey in 1965 and from 2004 was in a moribund state.  It’s in the process of being revived as an arts centre and hotel with some swish apartments thrown in.  That’s been controversial to some locally but it’s good to see the Grade II* building and its sumptuous interiors restored and put to use.  (You’ll find some images of the interior prior to restoration on my Tumblr post here.)

Hackney Town Hall

Hackney Town Hall, designed by Henry Lanchester and Thomas Lodge, is also formally neo-classical but its lines and styling are sleeker, more modern and, internally it’s a masterpiece of Art Deco.  When formally opened in 1937 by Lord Snell, Labour Leader of the House of the Lords, he described it as a building:

devoted to the business of living one with another to the benefit of all…It represented something more than mere stone and wood put together; it embodied the ideal of social living…a symbol of their idealism and a focal point for the services of their great borough, and he hoped they would find in it an atmosphere of quiet dignity, purity of administration and of love for the purpose to which it was devoted.

That’s an ideal of local governance that we would do well to remember and revive in these straitened times.

Hammersmith Town Hall

Over in West London, the new Hammersmith Town Hall (since 1965, the HQ of the Borough of Hammersmith and Fulham)was begun the following year and largely complete by 1939. It’s been described as ‘Swedish Georgian’; another fusion of Scandinavian,  Dutch with English Regency motifs added.  It was the work of Ernest Berry Webber, a specialist in municipal architecture who also designed town halls in Southampton and Dagenham (see below).

Walthamstow Town Hall

The consummation of this ambitious era of municipal construction is found in Walthamstow Town Hall (now belonging to the Borough of Waltham Forest) and the adjacent Assembly Hall – a magnificent civic complex fronted by sweeping lawns and a grand central pool and fountain.

The Town Hall, begun in 1937, was designed by Phillip Hepworth, after a competition attracting 70 entries, in a stripped down classical style owing something to Scandinavian contemporaries.  It was completed in 1942 under straitened wartime circumstances which curtailed the initially more sumptuous plans for its interior but its Art Deco touches remain impressive.

Do walk around the back of the building to see the five sculptures by John F Cavanagh, representing Education, Motherhood, Work, Recreation and Fellowship – the latter modelled appropriately on local son William Morris. There are further images in this Tumblr post.

Walthamstow Assembly Hall

The Assembly Hall, also designed by Phillip Hepworth in similar style, is famed for its acoustics and has become a favourite recording venue. The front of the Hall,  is inscribed with the words of William Morris (which also provide the Borough motto), “Fellowship is Life; Lack of Fellowship is Death’.

London City Hall © Garry Knight and made available through a Creative Commons licence

Finally, we can bring the story up to date by referring to some 21^st century examples of new civic architecture. City Hall, the home of the Mayor of London and Greater London Assembly, was opened in 2002 – a high-tech building created by Norman Foster and Partners. Not everybody likes its appearance but the building is notable for reflecting current imperatives of sustainable design.

Brent Civic Centre

The new Brent Civic Centre, opened in 2013 near Wembley Stadium lets us end on a positive note.  The building unites Brent’s civic, public and administrative functions under a single roof – in the words of its designers Hopkins Architects, ‘a new hub and heart for the community where residents can meet, shop and eat’.  The latter, of course, is another reflection of changed times and priorities and an ethos in which public service is at best complemented by commercial imperatives and, at worst, subordinated to them.

I haven’t seen it but it looks, to be fair, a rather stunning building and, since it houses a community hall and library as well as a civic chamber and offices for the 2000 employees who keep the borough’s services going, let’s celebrate it as a worthy update to the civic heritage this post records.

Next week’s post takes a look at the council housing featured in this year’s Open House London.