Battersea Arts Centre (Formerly Battersea Town Hall)

Battersea Arts Centre (formerly Battersea Town Hall)

This is a town hall, now arts centre, built 1892–3 by the Vestry of St Mary Battersea to the design of Edward William Mountford. The builder was Walter Wallis of Balham. Relief sculpture was executed by Paul R Montford, decorative plasterwork by Gilbert Seale of Camberwell, and mosaic floors by the Vitreous Mosaic Company, Battersea. The building was extended 1899–1901 to a design by Percy Ernest Pilditch.

The building is constructed of Suffolk red brick with Bath stone dressings. The original Westmorland slate roofs have been replaced with pantiles.

The building occupies a long, steeply sloping site. The south frontage block is two storeys and contains principal civic rooms and a large central stair hall. To the rear are a pair of lower, parallel two-storey wings, each with a series of offices alongside a corridor. A single-storey link block contains the entrance and lobby to the public hall, plus a reception room to the west. The hall is set at a slight angle to the main building, with corridors along either side in lower aisles. The stage is in a lower block at the north end with stairs to either side. A lower hall and service areas lie beneath.

The symmetrical front block is in a free Classical style, comprising five central bays flanked by single-bay square pavilions with rounded angles. The façade is largely in stone with banding to the red-brick first floor. A semi-circular Ionic portico has a dentilled cornice and balustraded parapet; the central panel is inscribed 'MUNICIPAL BUILDINGS'. The round-arched main entrance has carved putti in the spandrels. Ground-floor windows are segmental-arched with Gibbs surrounds; Diocletian windows appear in the end bays. The central and end bays of the first floor have Serlian windows framed in Ionic columns (those to the end bays paired), with balconies below; the remainder are round-headed. The central and end bays have shaped pediments with relief sculpture depicting, to the east, the young borough supported by Labour and Progress; to the west, the young borough instructed by Art and Literature; and in the centre, the Battersea parish crest and coat of arms supported by figures of Justice and Prudence. In the spandrel of the central window are figures of 'Authority' and 'Relaxation'. The east and west returns have first-floor Serlian windows framed by pilasters; the shaped pediments have keyed oculi enriched with scrolls and busts. A pulvinated frieze with egg-and-dart cornice runs beneath a balustraded parapet. The ground floor has square-pane sashes; the first floor has mullion and transom casements with leaded lights. Hipped roofs cover the building; that above the central bay is slightly raised and surmounted by a timber Ionic cupola on a lead base with a copper dome and weather vane.

The east and west elevations of the rear wings differ, the west having been raised from one to two storeys in 1899–1901. The east elevation has Diocletian windows to the ground floor and paired segmental-headed sash windows to the first floor and basement. Two entrances have Gibbs surrounds and oculi above. Segmental-headed dormers have tile hanging. An oriel window appears at the north-east angle of the gable. Tall moulded stacks rise from the roofline. The west elevation has similar fenestration with paired entrances to the north, a bracketed eaves cornice and shorter stacks.

The entrance to the public hall on the east side has an ornate cast-iron arched canopy carried on columns with a sign reading 'GRAND HALL', added in 1895. The entrance has paired round arches and attached columns; a pediment is carved with a putto bearing a cartouche inscribed 'Town Hall'.

The public hall is in a bold Arts and Crafts style. Six tall round-arched mullioned-and-transomed windows alternate with flying buttresses over 'aisles', those on the east side capped by stone domed finials. Segmental-headed windows appear below. The first bay of the east elevation has an irregularly massed gabled projection with a Serlian window, containing an entrance and stair to the gallery (a creative solution to an amendment imposed by fire-safety requirements); cast-iron railings with scrolled panels protect the basement area. The west elevation also has a stair projection, but plainer. A tall chimney stack is linked to the hall by a strainer arch. The pitched roof has tripartite eyebrow dormers; a central square timber cupola with an ogee roof caps the building.

The entrance lobby leads through a set of glazed timber doors to a vestibule with a ribbed plaster ceiling and egg-and-dart cornice, then through a stone arch into a large entrance hall. An imperial stair has a heavy ramped handrail and strings of Devonshire marble; Devonshire spar balusters and Sicilian marble steps. A stone arcaded gallery on three sides has Ionic pilasters, groin-vaulted ceilings and marble balustrades. The floor to the vestibule, stair hall and gallery is in turquoise mosaic with motifs of industrious bees and elaborate coloured floral borders. A coffered lantern roof is carried on a deep coved frieze of fibrous plaster enriched with cartouches, putti and swags. The ground-floor room to the east (now café) has a timber chimneypiece. The stair to the west wing has a cast-iron balustrade. A Second World War memorial on the landing is set in a timber aedicule. Entrances to the first-floor council chamber (now theatre), with 'Ayes' and 'Noes' signs, have been modified to form lobbies. The interior has oak dado panelling, now painted over, and a segmental barrel-vaulted ceiling enriched with plaster strapwork; a gallery stands at the east end. The former members' library to the east has been interconnected with the adjacent rooms to the north through doorways adapted from marble fire surrounds. Other rooms are plainer, but a number retain doors and plaster cornices. Mosaic flooring runs through the corridors.

The link block has an entrance lobby on the east side, leading through a set of glazed timber doors with transom lights into an octagonal vestibule covered by a cast-iron framed dome with stained-glass panels decorated with Renaissance motifs in yellow and brown (restored 1999). This is carried on a stone arcade with marble columns; a plaster frieze of oak and vine leaves carries a gilded quotation from Richard III: 'The purest treasure mortal times afford / Is spotless reputation: that away / Men are but gilded loam, or painted clay. / Mine honour is my life; both grow in one'. The floor has ornate mosaic. Two full-size plaster maquettes of sculptures by William Calder Marshall are installed (1894): Zephyr and Aurora, and Dancing Girl Reposing; a third, Eurydice, was relocated to Wandsworth Town Hall. Door surrounds to the hall and reception room have shaped pediments and lugged architraves. The reception room has a roof lantern carried on a deep coved frieze with strapwork decoration.

The public hall has a segmental barrel-vaulted ceiling with elaborate neo-Jacobean strapwork. A balcony with a concave timber-panelled front was enlarged in 1936. The proscenium arch and spandrels to the window arches are enriched with scrolls and putti. The organ was designed by Robert Hope-Jones, the creator of the theatre organ, then working for Norman & Beard, and was installed in 1900. This is housed in a handsome Baroque-style oak case of five sections (two either side of the proscenium arch and stage and one at the rear of the stage), designed by Pilditch. The lower hall, remodelled in 1926, has a ceiling with full-width plastered girders decorated with the borough motif, carried on square piers embellished with neo-Grec plasterwork, designed by Henry Hyams, assistant borough surveyor.

Until the late 19th century, London's local government operated under the parish vestry system. The first London-wide authority to take charge of infrastructure was the Metropolitan Board of Works, established in 1855, under whose aegis some of the less populous parishes were amalgamated under district boards of works. The semi-rural parish of St Mary Battersea had thus come under the jurisdiction of the Wandsworth District Board of Works, but the area rapidly transformed into a dense urban agglomeration and industrial centre and in 1888 the Vestry was reconstituted as the single local authority.

The fragmentary nature of London's local government in the mid-19th century meant that its municipal buildings were modest in comparison to some of the monumental town halls being built in provincial cities such as Leeds and Manchester, but as certain vestries achieved a greater civic consciousness, a series of more ambitious vestry halls emerged, and Battersea belongs to this later generation of 'reformed' vestries. In 1891 the Vestry held a limited architectural competition to design a town hall. The selected entry was by Edward William Mountford (1855–1908) who lived locally and had designed several public buildings, including Battersea Polytechnic, Battersea Public Library, and Sheffield Town Hall, and went on to design the Old Bailey (1900–7). The foundation stone was laid in November 1892 and the building was opened in November 1893 by Lord Rosebery, Chairman of the London County Council.

The London County Council was formed in 1889 to govern the former Metropolitan Board of Works area, and the London Government Act (1899) created 28 metropolitan boroughs. Battersea had emerged as a hub of radical politics in the 1880s under the labour activist John Burns, who was elected as the London County Council member for Battersea in 1890 and Independent Labour Member of Parliament for Battersea North in 1892. The Metropolitan Borough of Battersea's first council election of 1900 was won by the Progressive Party (the centre-left local-government party founded in 1888 with a majority on the London County Council), and the Labour Party gained control in 1919. In 1906 Battersea elected Britain's first black councillor, John Archer (1863–1932), who became mayor in 1913. In his acceptance speech, Archer said 'Battersea has done many things in the past, but the greatest thing it has done is to show that it has no racial prejudice, and that it recognises a man for the work he has done'.

The Borough of Battersea ceased to exist in 1965 when the London County Council was superseded by the Greater London Council, and Battersea and Wandsworth were merged as the London Borough of Wandsworth. Battersea Town Hall was saved from demolition through a public campaign, and was acquired on a lease by Battersea Arts Centre in 1981.