On 1 April 1965, London woke up with too many town halls. The London Government Act had merged more than 80 local authorities into 32 boroughs, and each of the old ones had a headquarters: a council chamber, a mayor’s parlour, an assembly hall built for dances and public meetings. St Pancras, Holborn and Hampstead became Camden. Three town halls now served one borough.
Sixty years on, the problem has not gone away. It has only changed shape. Councils now work from open-plan offices and hold many of their meetings on video. The grand building with the marble staircase costs a great deal to heat and repair, and it was designed around a way of working that no longer exists. So the question keeps coming back, in borough after borough: what do you do with a town hall when it is no longer needed as one?
Why these buildings are hard to let go
Town halls were never just offices. They were built as statements, usually in the best stone the rates could afford, by boroughs that wanted residents to feel the place they lived in mattered. That is why so many of them are listed, and why a plan to sell one tends to fill a public gallery.
They are also where a lot of local history actually happened. Marriages were registered, election results were read from the steps, and the assembly hall was hired out to whoever in the neighbourhood had something to say. Lose the building to private flats and that history goes behind a locked door.
Neglect is the other risk. Historic England’s Heritage at Risk programme exists because large public buildings decline quickly once the daily users leave. An empty civic building does not stand still. The roof goes first, then the plasterwork, and before long the repair bill is larger than anything a council can justify.
The three routes out
In practice there are three things that happen to a surplus town hall.
The first is residential conversion. It raises the most money up front and it is the least popular, because the public rooms are usually carved up or closed off for good.
The second is a hotel or a private members’ club, which keeps the grand rooms intact but narrows who gets to stand in them.
The third is to let the building carry on doing roughly what its assembly hall always did, which is host things: conferences, dinners, launches, concerts, awards nights. This route rarely makes headlines, but it has the strongest claim to continuity, because the hall was built for gatherings in the first place. The high ceilings, wide staircases and separate entrances that make these buildings awkward as offices are exactly what an event organiser is looking for.
A Kings Cross example
The 1937 Camden Town Hall building on Bidborough Street shows how the third route works. Designed by Albert J. Thomas and faced in Portland stone, it sits a few minutes from Kings Cross St Pancras, and its event spaces now trade simply as Town Hall, operated by Bottaccio.
The history there is the kind no new venue can buy. In 1957 the hall hosted a concert protesting the United States government’s treatment of Paul Robeson, whose passport had been withdrawn. Robeson sang to the audience down a transatlantic telephone line. Two years later, in 1959, the activist and journalist Claudia Jones launched the first Caribbean Carnival in the Assembly Hall, an event widely regarded as a forerunner of Notting Hill Carnival. In 1992 The Verve played the building.
The restoration kept the civic bones and changed what happens inside them. The main room, Vision Hall, has 13-metre ceilings, the interiors are by Tom Dixon, and the production equipment is broadcast-ready, which is what a modern conference or product launch expects. The room is still used for the same broad purpose it was built for, which is bringing a lot of people together under one roof.
What makes a second life work
Looking across the conversions that have lasted, a few things seem to decide whether reuse succeeds.
The big room stays big. The assembly hall is the asset. Schemes that subdivide it for short-term income tend to regret it, because a large room with a high ceiling is rare in central London and almost impossible to build new.
Transport does the heavy lifting. Town halls were put where people could reach them, usually beside a station or on a main road. That was a democratic decision in the 1930s and it is a commercial advantage now. A hall next to a major rail terminus is within reach of much of the country by train.
The operator invests in the unglamorous parts. Power, rigging, acoustics, kitchens and loading access are what separate a working venue from a handsome shell. Heritage buildings that skip this stage end up hosting the occasional film shoot and little else.
The history is used, not hidden. People choose an old civic building over a hotel ballroom because it feels like somewhere. Operators who tell the building’s story, and keep its original features visible, give organisers a reason to book that a newer room cannot match.
A public building, still in public use
There is a reasonable argument that a town hall hosting a company’s annual conference is no longer a civic building at all. But the alternative is rarely a return to the council chamber. It is scaffolding, a sales brochure and a concierge desk.
A hall that still fills with people, that still has music in it and still marks the big nights in someone’s working year, is doing something close to its original job. For a generation of buildings that London made redundant in 1965, that may be the best outcome on offer.