Battersea Town Hall, originally the New Parochial Offices, Battersea, is a Grade II* listed municipal building in Battersea, south London, designed by Edward Mountford and erected between 1891 and 1893 by the Battersea vestry to provide public halls and office space for its staff. The building served for 72 years as the hub of municipal Battersea until the centre of local government was moved to neighbouring Wandsworth in 1965, after which it transitioned to use as a community and arts centre, latterly known as the Battersea Arts Centre.
History
Background
A requirement for a town hall arose in Battersea in 1888, when the Battersea vestry regained autonomy from the Wandsworth District Board of Works under the Metropolis Management (Battersea and Westminster) Act of 1887. The Wandsworth board had assumed powers of local government of Battersea in 1855 from the Battersea vestry, but prodigious population growth in Battersea over the subsequent 30-years provided a rationale for the reversion to vestry control. The Wandsworth board had since 1858 operated locally from a relatively small Georgian property, Mellish House, at 68A Battersea Rise. The vestry deemed this site too small to house its then 120 staff; it aspired to a building providing halls capable of seating 1,500 and 300 people, as well as a boardroom for the vestry board and offices for churchwardens, overseers and staff.
Battersea's ambitions were an expression of the civic pride of newly autonomous urban and provincial governing bodies, which looked, for models, back to 15th-century Italian city republics and the Hanseatic League, and which vied to create increasingly splendid symbols of their power and importance in brick and stone. Town halls were, too, a manifestation of rivalry between authorities: "Birmingham Town Hall trumped by Liverpool St. George’s Hall, whose glory was stolen by Bradford St. George’s Hall, which was in turn trumped by Leeds Town Hall". By these yardsticks, Battersea's town hall - at the time known as the New Parochial Offices, Battersea - was to be a more modest affair, rejecting mock Gothic and Italianate styling in favour of an English Neo-Renaissance aesthetic blended with Arts and Crafts and vernacular elements. In part, this modesty reflected the smaller size of the London authorities, relative to the great provincial cites. Equally, at least amongst London town halls, Battersea Town Hall is cited as one of the most accomplished examples of a trend away from parsimony characterised by modest structures with minimal decoration, towards appreciable municipal architecture.
Development
Although initial consideration was given to the proposed hall in 1888, it was not until 1891 that the vestry decided to act on their ambitions and to allocate a budget of £42,000 to the project. Eight sites were considered, all south of the main east-west railway lines that divide the parish. The vestry decided upon the purchase of Elm House, a villa with a small wooded estate on Lavender Hill, previously the home of Jane Senior, and which was close to their Lavender Hill Library building, as the site for the new hall.
A competition was held to solicit designs for the proposed hall, to a brief drawn up by J. T. Pilditch, the vestry's surveyor, and with William Young, architect of the Glasgow City Chambers resident at nearby Putney, acting as judge. Young awarded the design project to Edward Mountford, who lived locally and was already well known to the vestry as architect of the 1889 ‘Early French Renaissance’ style Lavender Hill Library, and of Battersea Polytechnic. His credentials were good; he had also succeeded in a similar competition to design the much grander Sheffield Town Hall. Equally, as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography puts it, Mountford's lack of connections meant that in the early years of his practise he had ample time to dedicate to design competitions. The vestry committed an initial £25,000 to the cost of the proposed structure.
Work commenced in the winter of 1891-2, the vestry using direct labour - its own workforce; a recurrent feature of Battersea's approach to the provision of infrastructure - to clear the site, lay roads, drains and sewerage. However the construction was let by tender to the firm of Walter Willis of Balham, which quoted £25,750 for the job. Two foundation stones date the main construction phase to a 7 November 1892 start, and the building was opened - if not entirely completed - by the same time in 1893, by Lord Rosebery, Chairman of the London County Council.