Guildhall

On Saturday I made my first foray inside Guildhall during its biennial celebration: London Maze.  I haven’t got to the bottom of the name of this event, nothing to do with mazes. London Amaze would perhaps be more appropriate because this is what the old building does.
Dating from 1411, Guildhall has had to be repaired and much of it rebuilt over the years. It has suffered terribly from the obvious: the Great Fire and the Blitz. The roof of its Great Hall has been remodelled and replaced at least three times. It has been added to, most noticably by a grand entrance by George Dance the Younger in 1788 and the Guildhall Art Gallery (strictly speaking, next door) in the 1990s.  Fortunately, these works have been conducted sympathetically and skilfully by some of our best architects, men such as Dance and in the Victorian period, Sir Horace Jones. So it retains its essentially medieval character; the untrained eye would not realise how relatively little of the original 1411 fabric remains.
The greatest modern addition to the Guildhall is more a discovery than an addition, for it pre-dates the building by well over a millennium. When the site was being excavated for the new art gallery, ancient foundations were discovered. They turned out to be London’s Roman amphitheatre, one of the largest in the Empire. This delayed work on the gallery in order for the archaeologists to do their stuff. An excellent decision was taken rather than to re-inter the find, instead to retain it in its own space and turn it into a full-blown visitor feature.
So what is the Guildhall? It’s the town hall for the City of London and headquarters of the City of London Corporation. The Guildhall complex (as distinct from the old hall itself), hosts the administrative offices of the corporation plus the modern Guildhall library is one of the leading archives of London’s history, housing millions of records, images, art, old documents, pamphlets, books and newspapers. Following centuries of tradition, the Guildhall is still frequently used for ceremonial banquets.
The pictures below give but a tiny flavour of what the Guildhall is all about. The next opportunity for a comprehensive explore will be Open House London, 17 and 18 September.