Hornsey Town Hall - A Brief History of Hornsey Town Hall

A Brief History of Hornsey Town Hall

By the end of the First World War Hornsey Borough Council had outgrown their forty-year old offices at the edge of the borough in Highgate. In 1920 and 1923 the council had bought the long, wedge-shaped site of the present Town Hall. It contained Broadway Hall (destroyed by fire in 1923), Lake Villa and some cottages. The Council laid it out as a public park with a playground. By 1929 the Council had a plan to build their offices above the Broadway frontage, subsidised by shops below, but the lack of car parking made it unworkable.

A design competition was held in October 1933, assessed by a RIBA-appointed architect, C. Cowles Voysey, designer of the much-praised Worthing Town Hall. 1930’s architecture was emerging from the Edwardian era of Gothic and Baroque revival, Neo-Georgian, French Beaux-Arts and the Arts and Crafts movement. It was coming under increasing influence from the 1920s European idea that form should follow function. Steel elements were being used; soon followed by reinforced-concrete frames. These modern techniques, deployed without ornament, were seen as ‘honest’. The modern movement was naturally applied to modern uses – garages and factories, health clinics, swimming pools and underground stations.

Modern Town Hall building in the UK had begun in the late Victorian era in the industrial towns of the North and the Midlands. Before the First World War municipal architecture had been based on the classical brick-based style created by Sir Christopher Wren. It was exemplified by Chelsea Town Hall (1885-7) whose designer James Brydon called it Wrenaissance. In London between the First and Second World Wars the majority of metropolitan town halls were built - 26 new complexes over twenty years.

The town hall always contained a chamber on the top floor (for better ventilation and lighting) in which the mayor faced a semicircle (or horseshoe) of council members. It was used for a range of ceremonies with public access and needed to house an increasingly large staff of council workers. As well as a rates collection office, the town hall usually had a drawing office best illuminated by natural light, which the architect often placed around an open space such as an inner courtyard.

As the designs evolved council chambers were put further away from the front of the building to reduce the effects of street noise. Public assembly halls were added as a requirement to town halls built in the 1920 and 1930s, often built at the side or rear to permit future expansion.

At the time of the Hornsey competition the majority of London town halls built thus far fell into three main categories. There was the courtyard plan, sometimes left open, as at Hammersmith and at Beckenham. Examples of the long single range could be found at Dagenham and Friern Barnet. Less common was the group plan, where the elements were separate but linked to one another, as used by Bradshaw, Gas and Hope at Wimbledon in 1928-31.

Scandinavian public architecture was much admired, notably the simplified classical lines of Ragnar Östberg's Stockholm City Hall (1909–32). In the UK it was sometimes mixed with the traditional English approach to produce Swedish-Georgian. The brick-based Town Hall for Hilversum in Holland by Willem Dudok (1928–30) was considered significant enough to earn him a RIBA Gold Medal in 1935.