The Great Hall.
Guildhall, which is the Town Hall of the City of London, was completed in about 1440. Earlier buildings existed on the site serving the similar purposes since about 1128 or earlier, although no historian or archaeologist has ever pinned down exactly when London’s first Guildhall was built.
It is arguable that Guildhall is the oldest surviving secular building in the City, and it can also be claimed that it possesses the greatest historical interest after the Tower of London. Guildhall is laden with layers of history and legend, a medieval building with Saxon and possibly Roman antecedents.
Oldest of the legends is that Brutus of Troy, who was the mythical first king of ancient Albion, had his palace on the site of Guildhall, with giants Gog and Magog chained to the gates. Fearsome effigies of Gog and Magog have consequently watched over the building’s Great Hall for centuries. More feasible is that Dick Whittington financed the building of Guildhall. Richard Whittington (1354–1423) certainly served several terms as Lord Mayor, and was known as a wealthy trader who loaned money and left charitable bequests to benefit London.
Giants Magog (top) and Gog (bottom) oversee the Great Hall.
Firmly rooted in history are ten notable state trials that were held in Guildhall in the turbulent years between 1546 and 1615, which are listed on a memorial tablet. Most famous were those of Lady Jane Grey, briefly Queen of England, and of Archbishop Thomas Cranmer, both tried for High Treason. Guildhall survived the Great Fire of London in 1666, although it was damaged and its roof burned off.
The Great Hall is an impressively high vaulted space attributed to a master mason named John Croxton. Its scale and proportion are impressive today, and must have been overwhelming to those who saw it in the 1440s. Each successive century bought extensive changes. George Dance the Younger added a porch in 1789, and the Victorians inevitably made an extensive external renovation, which changed many details and added a minstrel’s gallery inside and a display of standards of measurements. The moment of greatest danger came on the night of 29–30 December 1940, when a heavy air raid started a series of fires across the City which began to join up, forming a fire storm that nearly overwhelmed parts of London as fire fighters struggled to keep the flames away.
Guildhall Standards of Length.
Guildhall was saved, but again suffered severe damage. The roof and windows were mostly destroyed but the four walls still stood, and much of statuary inside remained intact, although the figures of Gog and Magog were again destroyed. These were replaced in 1954 and the next year the restoration was complete, with a new roof on steel cantilevers designed by Sir Giles Gilbert Scott, the fifth to be applied to date. A statue of Churchill was unveiled, joining those of Nelson and Wellington, Apollo, Mercury, Neptune and Britannia.
High on the walls are displayed pennants of the twelve leading livery companies of the City of London. Other rooms to the side of the Great Hall include the print room, the chief commoner’s parlour and the old library.
The chief commoner’s parlour room, with vaulted ceiling in Elizabethan style.
With the rebuilding of Guildhall, work was also completed to the west side on new offices for the Corporation of London and on the eastern side was built the Guildhall Art Gallery, designed by Richard Gilbert Scott in 1999. During work on the foundations, remains of a Roman amphitheatre were found 20 ft (6 m) below ground level in the yard of Guildhall. The amphitheatre was partially excavated and can now be accessed from Guildhall Art Gallery. On the surface of yard the internal dimensions of the amphitheatre have been outlined by a large circle. The discovery of the amphitheatre was a surprise to historians of Guildhall, who have revised assessments of the early buildings on site, estimating that the siting of an earlier Saxon Guildhall was influenced by the amphitheatre’s position. Remains have also been found of a thirteenth-century gatehouse built directly over the southern entrance to the Roman amphitheatre. The current hall’s west crypt may be part of another thirteenth-century building.
Stuart coat of arms removed from the church of St Michael Bassishaw just before it was demolished in 1897, during an archaeological excavation when the remains of the church’s medieval foundations were uncovered. This plaster coat of arms, the grandest of those in any Wren church, is preserved in Guildhall.
Today Guildhall – never expressed as ‘The Guildhall’ – is used for official functions, entertaining visiting heads of state and for the official installation of the Lord Mayor, and is the scene of an annual keynote speech by the Prime Minister.