page_title: Battersea Town Hall
section_title: Development
hierarchical_section_title: Battersea Town Hall / History / Development
caption_attribution_description: English: OS map of Lavender Hill, Battersea, London, in the 1869-1874 period
context_page_description: 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.
context_section_description: 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 52,000 square feet (4,800 m²) 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.
caption: OS map of Lavender Hill c.1869. Elm House and grounds, the site of the Town Hall, is the rightmost yellow-shaded area
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