The Debating Chamber.
Today, County Hall is mostly a luxury hotel, and partly a separate budget hotel. It also contains an aquarium, a restaurant, private apartments, a gruesome theme attraction and the ticket office for the London Eye. It has recently also been an art gallery and a film museum. County Hall has housed diverse enterprises over the last thirty years, as this huge building has been adapted to new purposes after the Greater London Council was abolished in 1986. Although its original municipal government role is a fading memory, County Hall’s best and most hidden feature is the Council Chamber, which remains perfectly preserved in its centre.
The octagonal chamber could seat 200 members in a tiered horseshoe arrangement of seating. Green veined marble from Greece and black Belgian marble are used on the walls of the chamber and Italian marble on the columns. The chairman’s seat is reputedly made of black oak from a tree hewn at Villiers Street across the river. Bronze and leather are lavishly disposed about the chamber, carved lions’ heads decorations abound on the woodwork and the carpeting is bright blue. Four tall windows allow natural illumination.
Equally imposing is the ceremonial staircase, with its columns and barrel-vaulted ceiling. At the top of the staircase is a marble-lined lobby, which surrounds the Council Chamber.
The entrance staircase.
Some original corridors of County Hall remain, bearing a more utilitarian style of decoration. They are survivors of what was once estimated be over 5 miles (8 km) of parquet-floored passages, running lengthways and crossways with a complex room-numbering system. The building’s interior was reworked several times to increase accommodation over the years, but it is possible in places to imagine the main layout, with white glazed-tile internal courtyards and lightwells, two splendid main doorways for council members and officers, and several minor entrances for staff. Chimneypieces and fireplaces abounded in the offices and rooms. Rooms may at one time have totalled 900 in various styles, reflecting the hierarchy of the place, varying between lavish and austere, some oak-panelled, some deal-panelled, with plaster walls in the basement. The rooms along the river frontage were particularly elegantly appointed, with fireplace and bookcases. The exterior stone carving and statuary, most of it on the river side, remains intact. Some areas, including the Council Chamber, are available to hire for corporate purposes. Predictably, it has featured in several feature films masquerading as exotic locations.
Riverside suite of offices.
The name County Hall is now understood to describe the original long continuous Portland stone building designed by Ralph Knott around a central crescent facing the river, built between 1907 and 1922 to house 2,300 personnel. But County Hall has been greater than that. Additional responsibilities were taken on by the London Council in the last century, which ranged in early days from tramway supervision, licensing of premises and then later included social care, vehicle licencing, town planning, administration of council housing and education. County Hall and its staff just kept growing. Two new eight-storey office blocks were built alongside the original building, starting in the 1936, and two more annexe buildings were added after 1960, the last being finished only in 1974, when the final extensions and infilling of the main building were completed. Taken together, County Hall was by then a colossus, accommodating up to 8,500 staff. In political terms it had become a sacred monster with a target painted large on its back. Construction had started in Edwardian days and continued during the era of growing social responsibility, through two World Wars and beyond. The London County Council had become the Greater London Council, but economic and political changes made it vulnerable to mandated decentralization and devolved responsibilities.
Record of the Leaders of the London County Council and Greater London Council.
After the GLC was dissolved in 1986, there was a ten-year tangle of planning issues covering the future use of the buildings. At the time, County Hall represented an unwieldy proposition for any owner, and there was a genuine concern no viable future use could be found. The Inner London Education Authority was housed there briefly, and there were proposals for County Hall to be converted into a police headquarters, or even a prison, but the political climate favoured sale into private ownership over public use, and the building was sold to a property developer. Its future was cemented in 1998 with opening of the London Marriott Hotel County Hall, which was built with an opening on the Westminster Bridge Road side which had once been the carriage entrance. The London Eye opened by the river a year later, a Premier Inn budget hotel was established at the northern end, and the London Aquarium and the London Dungeon moved in. Other enterprises have come and gone. Most of the 1930s County Hall buildings have been converted into private apartments and extended. The two post-war annexes were demolished and hotels built on those sites, making the area a distinct hotel cluster.