Hornsey Town Hall - The Architect

The Architect

The 218 competitors were asked to submit designs for a council chamber, committee rooms, administrative offices and a multi-purpose hall with seating for 800 to 1,000 people, complete with an upper gallery, for no more than £100,000. The character of the building ‘should be dignified and indicate its purpose’, rather than boast ‘elaborate decoration and detail which is not required’.

In October 1933 the £150 prize and the job of building the Town Hall was awarded to Reginald Harold Uren, a 27 year old ‘modern’ architect who had won the Manchester Trades Exhibition competition earlier that year. He had come to London from his native Christchurch, New Zealand in 1930, to train at the Bartlett. By the time he had completed the Town Hall in 1935, Uren had joined the firm of Slater and Moberly (later Slater & Hodnett, and now the Slater Partnership).

During the 1930s his firm undertook a number of commissions, notably the extension to the Hospital for Nervous Diseases in Queen Square, Bloomsbury. In 1938 he settled in a house he designed himself in Kerry Avenue, Stanmore and became a strong supporter of the Stanmore Society. Designs for the new town hall in Southall were abandoned because of the war. His design for Ruislip-Northwood was never executed because of the re-organisation of the GLC. In 1968 his firm’s design for the impressive Norfolk County Hall at Norwich was successfully completed. Its careful brick detail, unusual at the time, can perhaps be traced back to Uren’s early experience at Hornsey. Likewise, the concern to integrate architecture and other arts, demonstrated early on at Hornsey, remained a preoccupation in post-war work. Uren was a member of the RIBA standing committee on art, and his interest is illustrated both by his firm’s large building for John Lewis in Oxford Street (1960–66) with exterior sculpture by Barbara Hepworth and by the showrooms for Sandersons nearby in Berners Street (1957–61). He was the first recipient of the New Zealand award of merit for architecture. He returned to New Zealand on his retirement, and lived there until his death on 17 March 1988.