Tower Hamlets town hall review an old hospital immaculately stitched up

The £125m transformation of the Royal London hospital into an elegant seat of local government is a sleek operation that has retained the 18th-century building’s original aura and poise

There’s an old view of the London Hospital, around the time it was built in the 1750s, that shows it standing like a stately home, symmetrical, classical and serene, in fields on which an expanding city encroaches. Even the Whitechapel Mount, a gigantic pile of rubble and dung that loomed over one end of the new building, somehow looks in this image like a landscape feature on a gentleman’s estate.

Life has since swirled round it and through it, over the quarter-millennium in which the East End of London became (then ceased to be) a churning industrial leviathan, built up, blitzed and rebuilt, that generated world-famous legends of deprivation and human resilience – the story of Joseph Merrick, the elephant man, for example, who spent the last years of his short life in the hospital. Through all of which, a bit battered and dis-arranged, the old hospital building, like an admiral on a shot-to-pieces deck, has retained something of its original aura and poise.

These qualities stand it in good stead in its latest role, as the new town hall of the London borough of Tower Hamlets – the hospital itself, now called the Royal London, having relocated to a colossal neighbouring hulk, built under a private finance initiative during the Blair administration. The all-purpose civic gravitas of its Georgian proportions and pedimented front transfers easily from an old-fashioned hospital to a seat of local government.

Times, though, have changed, and it’s no longer considered adequate for local authorities to assert benign superiority over their populace. They have to be accessible and approachable, so the hierarchy of the old architecture is infiltrated by new arrangements that are more off-centre, horizontal and diffuse. There are also different devices for communicating seriousness. Where in the old building a Doric portal denoted stability, strength and connection with the past; that job is now done by exposing the structure’s layers of time, and adding crisp new architecture alongside.

The £124.7m transformation into a town hall has been designed by Allford Hall Monaghan Morris, architects who have always prospered by combining high levels of pragmatism and skill with, on occasion, invention and flair. They design some of the best office blocks around, but also public buildings such as the Stirling prize-winning Burntwood School in south London. They also have a record of making over older buildings, as with their headquarters for the Metropolitan police at New Scotland Yard and their conversion into homes and hotel of the BBC’s former Television Centre in White City.

With the old London Hospital building they have stripped away accretions to expose the composite carcass of the 18th-century building and substantial extensions from the 19th and early 20th century. Here the country-house order of the original persists, albeit with interruptions – early operating theatres, for example, glazed like conservatories to allow maximum daylight, poke through the roofline. What is now the main portico, added in 1890, presents, thanks to historical vicissitudes, an oddly off-centre face to the street, with a lone, arched window winking at one end.

AHMM don’t try too much to tidy up these accidents of time. Rather, in a way that goes back to Norman Foster’s Sackler Galleries at the Royal Academy, via the theatre projects of Howarth Tompkins, they expose histories of damage and repair, the scars, grafts and prosthetics of the old hospital. They then add a new block to the back, clean-lined, spacious and businesslike. An atrium rises in the suture where old and new meet, with high steel pillars rising next to a weathered wall of London stock bricks.

They have also added the new council chamber, dignified but approachable, with a weighty ceiling in deeply coffered concrete. Off to one side of the atrium runs an extensive horizontal space, somewhat warehouse-like, constructed with skinny stanchions, beams and X-shaped bracing in black steel. This contains extensive shelving for what will be a library (the books haven’t been installed yet) – a little mysteriously so, as there is already such a thing just across the road, in the “Idea Store” designed by David Adjaye.

In this library zone, the floor descends until it matches the level of calm new public space outside, designed by Kinnear Landscape Architects, accessed through a long horizontal glass band in the building’s facade. Beyond this space is the more frantic Whitechapel Road, a street with a busy market and an architectural history made up of jostling shops and ex-pubs, and then the local underground station, enhanced last year by the addition of the Elizabeth Line. Another open space is being finished to the back of the town hall, in the area between it and the new hospital.

Taken together, these new and old places create a continuous multifarious fabric of space that extends from an Elizabeth Line carriage to the inside of the council chamber via the station, street, library and atrium. It’s a journey through a collective memory of striving, and of destruction and reconstruction. This spreading, multi-level, step-free flow is quite different from the more vertical and contained order of the original building, but it’s a complementary rather than a conflicting relationship. You can still walk up steps to the old central portico if you want to – it’s just not the only option.

AHMM have brought some nice touches to the project, such as glazed bricks in a deep red borrowed from colours they found in the old building. There are pleasingly knotty assemblies of newly exposed old steelwork, a bit like an Anthony Caro sculpture, painted a similar red. There’s a multi-faith prayer room behind a big clock in the centre of the old pediment, illuminated by its back-to-front face, and an office where the lights and dials of an old operating theatre have been preserved to a possibly unnerving degree. The exterior of the new blocks is wrapped in a shallow relief of matt and shiny bricks, set between slender piers, and vertical steel fins in a reddish spectrum of colour.

In places the new town hall feels, for now at least, a bit arid. For all the welcome and scrupulous recollection of the past, it could also do with something more celebratory of the present. Once municipalities liked to have colourful representations of their boroughs around their council chambers, perhaps a mosaic or a fresco with anchors and mermaids and other maritime themes (this being an area closely connected to the old docks), but here you only get dark sober panels. There’s something deadening, somehow, about the lighting in the atrium.

But mostly the new Tower Hamlets town hall achieves something that seemed in danger of becoming obsolete, a public building of pride and quality – in stark contrast to the council’s dismal former premises, which were in a rented commercial office block on the very edge of the borough. It is genuinely welcoming and accessible. It opens up this historic neighbourhood as never before. I’ve seen the suture, one might say, and it works.

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