Hillingdon Civic Centre and integrated hard landscaping, including paving, planters, steps and walls

Hillingdon Civic Centre and Integrated Hard Landscaping

A civic centre designed in 1971 and largely built between 1973 and 1977, with the civic suite completed in 1978 and external works including landscaping finished in 1979. It was designed by Robert Matthew Johnson-Marshall (RMJM), with Andrew Derbyshire as partner in charge and Terence Swales as project architect. The building incorporates part of the earlier Middlesex county council offices of 1939, designed by CG Stillman.

The building has a reinforced concrete frame clad in narrow handmade brown brick in English bond. Brick planters are incorporated at ground floor level and on upper balconies. The very steep pitched roofs are tiled and the windows are of hardwood. Ground-level covered ways, reached from an open square to the front, are paved in brick and concrete slab. Courtyards, paths and garden spaces throughout the site are paved with brick.

The building is sited on an irregularly shaped corner plot between the High Street to the north and the curving dual-carriageway of Hillingdon Road to the east and south. The main entrance is reached across a large square that opens from the High Street. The complex comprises two distinct parts. Behind the main entrance, the council offices have a diamond-shaped footprint and a stepped profile of three and four storeys, set over a semi-basement car park. To the east of the square, connected behind the main entrance, is a second, more irregularly shaped part containing the council chamber, civic suite and registry office, also with parking beneath. Part of the 1939 building is visible to the south and from an internal courtyard to the rear.

The exterior is complex and varied, its aesthetic defined by dramatic roof-lines and modelling executed in warm tones of brick and tile. Windows are set flush into shallow recessed panels with a toothed course at the head. The entrance is reached up a flight of steps within a raised single-storey loggia-like pavilion with its own steep roof. The main elevations overlooking the square have glazing arranged in a grid over a partially open ground floor, raised over covered walkways. The clock tower from the earlier building has been resited and is visible from the square, where a bank of landscaping is also positioned at the front.

To the south, covered ways open into landscaped gardens with brick paviors and planters. To the sides and rear of the offices, roofs step down over the first and second floors, where square fenestration is set between brick piers with some square blind panels above. Multiple small bays, some set at angles, appear to cascade down the building. The semi-basement is set forward as a plinth to the sides with arched openings providing light, and to the rear with ventilation for the car park. Entrances and exits are at the corners of the plan.

The east side of the complex has varied roof forms with larger scale and more irregular massing. The remains of the 1939 building are visible to the south. This earlier structure has a distinctive Moderne style with deep, semi-circular projecting wings and wide multi-pane steel windows. From the internal courtyard, it displays a more classical style with light red brick over a Portland stone ground floor.

Subsidiary features include a number of paths and open spaces around the building paved with a mixture of brick and slab. Raised brick planters are distributed throughout, and the change in levels across the site is addressed by steps, ramps and high-level walkways, all of brick.

The interior of the building is not of special architectural or historic interest.