Deptford Town Hall is a municipal building in New Cross Road, Deptford, London. It is a Grade II* listed building and is currently owned and operated by Goldsmiths College.[1] In 1966 the architectural critic Ian Nairn described it as 'The jolliest public building in London'.[2]
History
The building was commissioned to replace the aging vestry hall of St Paul's.[3] The site selected had previously been occupied by a row of residential properties with public baths behind.[4]
The new building was designed by Henry Vaughan Lanchester, James Stewart and Edwin Alfred Rickards in the Baroque style and built by Holloway Brothers; it was officially opened by the mayor, Councillor Joseph Pyne, on 19 July 1905.[5] The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with seven bays facing onto New Cross Road; the central section featured a round arched doorway flanked by figures of Tritons as corbels on the ground floor; there was an oriel window on the first floor with a carved relief of a ship's prow and a pediment containing a tympanum depicting a naval battle above that.[1] Statues of four naval figures, Sir Francis Drake, Robert Blake, Horatio Nelson and an unnamed contemporary admiral, were designed by Henry Poole,[6] and erected on the front of the building at first floor level.[3] A clock tower with a weather vane in the shape of a galleon was erected at roof level.[7][8] Internally, the principal rooms were the council chamber and the mayor's chamber on the first floor.[1]
During the First World War, the town hall was infamous for holding all its trials of conscientious objectors in secret.[9] This controversial practice was more recently explored in the film, Devils on Horseback, released in 2018.[10][11]
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