Haringey Civic Centre

Haringey Civic Centre

A civic centre built between 1955 and 1958, designed by Sir John Brown, A E Henson and Partners, with J E S Sayers as partner in charge.

The building is principally a four-storey elongated rectangular block with a reinforced concrete structural frame and foundations. Portal frames provide a clear span of 47 feet to the council chamber and support a former caretaker's flat above. Large cylindrical columns supporting the public gallery of the chamber also serve as a plenum duct and boiler flue. The exterior is faced in hand-made golden brown two-inch brick and precast reinforced stone, with aluminium-framed windows and glazed screens.

The plan is divided into three zones: offices to the north, public-facing and civic spaces to the south including the council chamber and registry office, and a western wing containing the mayoral suite, members' rooms and committee rooms. The main elevation faces west with an off-centre entrance positioned towards the south.

The entrance opens into a triple-height foyer spanning the building's depth and intersecting a central corridor running north-south. This provides access to cellular offices to the north and registry office rooms on the ground floor to the south. Above the registry office sits a double-height council chamber with viewing gallery on the first and second floors. The fourth floor contains a caretaker's flat over the council chamber, further office rooms and a former staff canteen to the north. Extending westwards from the entrance foyer at right-angles to the main block is a long narrow first-floor range, supported on square piloti, which contains the mayoral suite, members' and committee rooms over a covered walkway. The basement contains utility rooms, a bomb shelter designed to withstand nuclear attack, and escape tunnels leading to the external gardens.

The principal elevation is an understated composition comprising three storeys clad in brick and a recessed attic level clad in stone. The civic and public portion is defined by a projecting stone frontispiece with full-height glazing and an off-centre entrance canopy supported by square columns. At first floor level a projecting balcony opens from the council chamber, embellished with a metal relief sculpture depicting the civic shield of the Municipal Borough of Wood Green. To the right of the frontispiece, the council offices portion is clad in brick and marked by nine evenly-spaced bays with large windows with unmoulded stone surrounds.

To the rear, the ground and first floors project slightly and are faced in stone, with panels of multiple small square pierced openings with glazed blocks and continuous bands of floor-to-ceiling glazing held in metal frames. The third storey returns to the evenly-spaced bays of the principal elevation, and the stone attic storey, set behind a balcony that runs through the west, north and east elevations, shows an irregular arrangement of glazing and open voids. The west wing is clad in stone with continuous bands of floor-to-ceiling glazing to the north and south, and an open ground-floor colonnade. The south elevation of the main block is marked by glazing at ground floor level within a stone surround, with a central entrance door. The north elevation of the main block features full-height glazing within a stone surround. The exterior of the building remains essentially unaltered.

The interior decorations and fittings were designed by the architects, featuring high quality materials. The entrance foyer walls are lined with Florentine Travertine marble and include fixed bench seating. A helical staircase towards the back rises to a bridge on the first floor, reinforced to take up the torsional effects of the stair, connecting the council chamber with offices to the north and the mayoral suite and members' and committee rooms in the west wing. The curved, glazed back wall of the public gallery of the council chamber breaks into the foyer space at second floor level. The floor of the entrance foyer and helical staircase are faced in gritted Serpegient marble. Timber panels to the rear of the foyer behind the stair are edged in gold. The staircase handrail and balcony balustrade in the foyer are of anodised aluminium, as are door surrounds. Some partitioning has been added to the left of the stair behind the reception desk, including the insertion of a lift up to the bridge. Access into the office corridors to the north has been restricted by the insertion of sets of glazed aluminium doors.

The panelling throughout the building, such as in the registry office, committee rooms, mayoral suite and council chamber, is in English straight-grained elm, with other joinery in guarea. In the council chamber, the wall panels are slotted for acoustics and arranged in overlapping vertical fins with lighting between them. The curved acoustic ceiling is similarly arranged as overlapping fins with lighting between. The Mayor's dais remains in situ, panelled behind with dark green Verte de Fre marble and with a stepped canopy over. The horseshoe seating in the body of the council chamber was removed in 1965, but the bench seating with green leather cushions in the public gallery survives.

The committee rooms, members' rooms and mayoral suite are accessed from a glazed corridor in the west wing, which features further use of Florentine Travertine, large dish-like aluminium uplighters and elm panelling in the rooms, some of which have large sliding doors to join the spaces together. Travertine is also used on the end wall and columns of the main room of the registry office, shown as the 'large marriage room' on original plans, with elm panelling elsewhere. The offices to the north have a more modest finish, progressively so towards the top of the building, and some of these spaces have been modernised. The two staircases in this part of the building have terrazzo steps and handrails of glass, timber and aluminium.