The Romford Civic Centre That Was Never Built
Romford’s 1935 plans included a 1,512-seat assembly hall and refreshment room that never made it beyond the drawing board.
Havering Town Hall is only part of what Romford’s civic leaders originally intended to build on Main Road in the 1930s.
When Romford Urban District Council held its architectural competition in 1935, architects were not simply asked to design offices. The brief was for a complete civic group containing municipal offices and a substantial public assembly hall.
The winning design came from Bournemouth architects Herbert R. Collins and Antoine Englebert O. Geens. Their plans deliberately treated the municipal offices and assembly hall as separate units that could work together, but could also be built independently if money required the project to be completed in stages.
The proposed assembly hall was ambitious. The Architects’ Journal recorded seating for 1,288 people on the main floor and another 224 in a gallery, giving a total capacity of 1,512. It was intended for concerts, banquets and other large civic functions.
A refreshment room between the council suite and assembly hall was designed to double as a reception hall or buffet. The architects also used the natural slope of the site so that the first-floor council suite could connect conveniently with the assembly hall on the higher ground level.
Cost was central to the competition. The winning scheme was estimated at £54,502 in total. The Architects’ Journal gave separate estimates of £24,909 for the municipal offices and £27,530 for the assembly hall and refreshment room when discussing the scheme’s cubic costs.
The assessor praised the winning proposal for combining a strong plan with low cost and specifically expressed the hope that its economy would allow the assembly hall to be built as well as the offices.
That hope was never realised.
Historic England’s official listing confirms that the proposed refreshment hall and assembly hall were never constructed. The L-shaped municipal offices opened in 1937 and became the building now known as Havering Town Hall.
The original drawings survive in the Historic England Archive, preserving a glimpse of a much larger civic centre that Romford might have had.
Sources and further reading
The Architects’ Journal, 8 August 1935
Historic England Archive: proposed Municipal Offices and Assembly Hall
Historic England listing
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