Envy of Kings: The Guildhall of London - Dr Simon Thurley

well good evening ladies and gentlemen it's very nice to see you all it's very nice to be back here in the Museum of London and starting for me a new series of four lectures in which I'm going to be talking about some of the most important and interesting buildings in London and the interaction between architecture politics social life and the topography of the capital city and tonight I am going to start with a building that may be familiar to some of you the City of London guild hall and I'm decided to call my lecture this evening the envy of Kings the guild hall of London and the power of the medieval corporation you know I think there are very few secular buildings in England that after 600 years are still broadly used for their original purpose and the guild hall in the city is one of them although it was started in 1411 it encompasses parts of pre to previous guild halls the first one which dates back to the eleven 20s so this evening I'm going to have a look at this building we're gonna start at the beginning and we're going to go right the way through to the end and I'm gonna try and set it in the context and ask the question all the way through what does it tell us about London what does it tell us about its governments what does it tell us about the the governance of the city so the first a guild hall looked probably a little like the hall of oakum Castle in Rutland this building which you see on the screen here was built in the 1180s and is an extremely rare surviving early Hall and when you look at the extremely fine reconstruction of the guild hall of London and its surroundings done by molas in 2007 you can see what they think the hall looked like and I think it probably looked a bit more like that and we had aisles but there we are that's what they've what they've shown and I think it gives a very good representation and it was while this building was standing that the City of London's powers were crystallized and it won its treasured judicial and political privileges from the crown as well of course as its first mayor now I'm not going to dwell on this this evening because the story I really want to focus on starts in 1298 as it was probably then when the idea to create a new Civic Centre in the center of the city was hatched the initial impetus for this may have been to build a civic chapel but by the 1330s there was also an intention to rebuild the guild hall but to do this as ways the city needed a wealthy sponsor and it's likely to found it in sir john poke me a financier who thanks to a shrewd financial nose became one of the richest men in England now today he is best remembered for his house called Penshurst place in Kent which was begun in 1338 to nine and a part of this was a magnificent Great Hall which you see here and incredibly it is today much as Pulteney left it Penshurst and Pulteney were as grand as it got and if you want to envisage the second guild hall take a train to penshurst and enjoy its unspoiled magnificence the new guild hall was much more sophisticated than its predecessor and reflected the increasing complexity of the job of governing the city here is a plan of it in its undercroft and of course the undercroft survives you can still go to see the undercroft of this guild hall probably met the court of hustings and above and this plan shows the first floor in the main hall met the Common Council in the main body of the hall here and the mayor's court which you see met up here but the new guild hall was not just a building it was in fact a district or to give it its technical term it was a precinct the first guild hall had stood alone the second one was defined by gate houses and seven-foot high walls it had no facade to the street no real visibility to the outside world it was completely hedged in by houses shops and other buildings and here you see the gate houses you'd have to go through to get into the yard outside and get access to the guild hall itself now you could argue that this was for security as medieval London of course was a turbulent place but to be quite frank 7th foot high wall was unlikely to deter any serious writer in fact the guild hall was far from being alone London at this date was a city of precincts in all there were more than 20 religious institutions in the city each one of which was set in a walled enclosure just like a modern Cathedral closed so today when you visit Canterbury you walk down the street you see the gatehouse you're almost completely unaware that the cathedral is there through the gate as you walk past when you eventually go through it you see the cathedral on the other side now within the the precinct of the guild hall there was a magnificent Chapel probably built by the King's Own craftsmen - this was added in 1356 a Chantry college of five priests that's to say and a chap that was staffed with a residential corpus of priests saying mass for the souls of the Dead this wasn't a sort of mini monastery it was more like a life well perhaps I should say death insurance policy for the alderman of the city in addition to the chapel within the precinct there was a hole which was used as the main market for woollen cloth which of course by this stage was London's principal export and all these buildings and this reconstruction begins to share it were probably set in Nice gardens and orchards around the outside planted with trees and flowers so this precinct was the Civic economic and judicial hub of the city now the largest of all the city precincts wasn't the guild hall precinct it was the precinct of st. Paul's this precinct was home to perhaps 300 people as many as a small city parish and the city government I think rather resented the independence of this huge enclaved this just is a line showing where we're obviously this is the medieval cathedral as the Wren building underneath you can see how large it was his Paternoster Square and the gate houses six gatehouse is leading into this walled precinct but I think some polls although it's very close to the guilt or precinct isn't in fact the most appropriate parallel for the Guildhall the place that the Guildhall looked to was far more ambitious because it was in fact Westminster Palace Westminster which you see here this is the end Westminster Abbey 307 chapel this is the surviving Westminster Hall and the houses of parliament now are located in this zone here this was the principal royal palace of England and had been since the reign of Edward confessor and at its heart was this extraordinary hall which hasn't been started by William Rufus in 1097 this was the ceremonial throne room of England and like the guild hall it contained the law courts that sat in the symbolic president that written in the symbolic presence of the Kings marble throne on a dais at the high end of the hall the palace itself was set in a ruled precinct which you can see the dotted line of here with a massive great gateway here the wall come across here and very very high clock tower and then the wall coming down to a water gate which allowed you to come and go on your barge and the wall went down by the river here and continued and in the corner here is the dual Tower which still exists here's the Victoria Tower in the House of Lords you can still see it the corner of the precinct before you come here so this is the Royal great Royal precinct in Westminster and here is a view by halle showing the outer court of the precinct so you are looking at this angle here all right there is the clock tower this is pretty big thing there is the gatehouse here you are in the outer precinct and here is the entrance to the hall clock tower gateway entrance to the hall and it had this wonderful fountain in the middle which on great occasions was linked to a system up here which they filled with red wine and it poured out wine for the amusement of the populace and only the the so this this precinct I think is the direct parallel for what's happening in the city like the guild hall it wasn't a religious zone it wasn't a domestic zone it was a Civic it was a judicial it was a ceremonial space now between about fourteen eleven and fourteen fifty the City of London drove a campaign of civic improvements and the star of this was to be yet another new guild hall this one was to be built by the Mason John Croxton and it was commissioned by the Lord Mayor Richard Whittington and this is the hall that survives to this very day preserving in its western half the undercroft of the building which I've just been talking about this room built by Croxton and Whittington when it was completed was the second largest secular space in England only Westminster Hall was larger it's nearly 50 meters long and seventeen and a half meters wide and it was an engineering feat to cover it as far as we know unlike Westminster Hall it was covered with great a great stone vaulted roof with great stone and arches inside the word Babli at each end here and here where the courts could be held on the north side was the entrance to the most important Court which of course was the Lord Mayor's Court here a separate building and off to the side in a little court here was the Ottomans court and I think it's interesting that the most most of the really important rooms were rebuilt and smaller and warmer and more comfortable while the Great Hall was built bigger and grander without any form of heating why didn't Croxton simply build court rooms for these courts as well instead of instead of leaving them in this huge unheated hall the answer to this is the clue to understanding this building the importance of what was being built here is because a crock stones guild hall was no ordinary building it was a deeply traditional structure steeped in rich symbolism you see great holes are the fundamental building unit of English architecture from the Saxons until after the Civil War long before the Normans conquered England the Great Hall was the center of gravity of life for the rich their families and their retinues but what the Normans were to do was to build one hall that was to change all the rules and this of course was the hall that I've already mentioned built at Westminster Palace by William the Conqueror's son William Rufus Rufus Hall stood as the great royal throne room until in 1393 richard ii who you see here sitting on his throne decided to modernize it a project that he completed in 1401 he retained the massive norman walls here and here but he inserted big new gothic windows into them and the norman ruth was placed replaced by the largest and most important piece of carpentry in Western Europe this spectacular hammer beam roof which you see here in this drawing and on each of these hammer beams these are the pieces of stick out here you can see there was a massive angel holding the arms of England this roof was thus a representation of the heavens spread out over the earthly court of Richard ii and this was not the only religious connotation in the hall because on the south wall behind the dais here there were six mitches one two three four five six they're still there and these and figures of Kings rather like a cathedral pulpit um so here's York's MIT York Minster niches containing figures of kings and it wasn't only the inside that had these religious connotations because when he went outside the entrance facade which you see here was treated like a cathedral or an abbey so like a cathedral the Abbey it had two great towers here and low down here there was a screen of niches and the niches 27 of them contained statues of English kings and queens so the King Richard the seconds Westminster Hall absolutely uniquely in English architecture sort equivalent status with the most important religious buildings this of course was a comment on his particular take on kingship now if William Rufus's Great Hall was influential Richard's new hall which I've just given you a a tour of now was absolutely mesmerizing and as Dick Whittington and his architect contemplated the new guild hall it was this that they looked towards unquestionably this was the model for the guild hall but the guilt all and its courts were again part of a larger and more ambitious plan that included the rebuilding of the guild hall chapel and the college buildings next to it and building a new library the library was paid for by the executives of Richard Whittington and it probably looked a bit like this building you may know this this is from ins Chantry the library that was built at Winchester College in 1425 to 46 and then there was the new chapel which like the guild wall itself took 20 years to build this is Caroline Behrens reconstruction of the guild hall drawn by the late very brilliant terry ball you can see the guild hall here and this is the chapel which went with it and here you see molasses reconstruction of the whole precinct as it existed by 1450 so here you have the gate houses you're in the outer courts here there is the massive massive Great Hall I mean here is the the Chantry chapel next door and the library now we have to remember that the merchants who were the aldermen and Lord mayors were highly cosmopolitan people and they would have seen the civic halls in the cities with which they traded across Europe and they would have been extremely aware that these great city halls of Europe were showpieces advertising the splendor of the town corporations which built them so you'll all be familiar with this one from your holidays this is of course the Palazzo publico and Siena this is of course much older its begin begun in the 12 90s and completed in 1344 and this huge show facade faces right onto the main square of the city and it is this which is what the great town halls of Flanders and Brabant did in northern Europe so we go to Bruges well you may also have been on your holidays this is the Hotel de Ville in Bruges built in 1376 to 1420 so it's completed about the same time as the guild hall of London and this building as you will recall if you've been there completely dominates the city square as does the brussels hotel-de-ville extended in his brussels extended in 1444 255 but it was first built more or less at the time of the london guild hall in 1402 - 14 20 when we look at other medieval guild halls built in England we don't see anything remotely as grand as these examples I have given you from Europe well first of all the English towns were nothing like as rich and their guild halls are generally rather a poor lot compared to their direct trading partners across the channel so let's go to Norwich here we are Norwich of course was England's second largest city for much of the Middle Ages a very very big very prosperous town with extraordinary trading links across the North Sea into the Baltic with the Hanseatic towns it was given its charter incorporation in 1404 and it immediately set out to build itself this gilt wall there it is the merchants here were perfectly aware of the appearance of the city halls of the places with which they were trading and like its continental cousins this guild hall sits in the main market square in a rather sort of English way making as big a splash as it as it could it's impossible to believe that if Richard Whittington and his fellow aldermen had wanted to build a show building like Bruges or even Norwich - they wouldn't build one they could have brought up the neighboring land or they could have swapped land to give the London guild hall a street Vantage they could have even given London a central square like Norwich or Bruges or like most other leading trading centres elsewhere in the world but the new london guild hall wasn't an excuse for not having built something that looked like Bruges because the London guild hall set out to inchi achieve something completely different now as we all know size is important and on a European scale the London guild hall was very big here is the Palais de justice in Rouen started in 1499 spectacular public and with a hall exactly the same size as the London guild hall so it wasn't size that the London guild hall lacked it was showmanship you see English medieval buildings and are interested in show but they tend to rely on surprise and confinement rather than simple visual excess so if you consider English cathedrals I did it with you've noticed but they are always set encloses in the corner of a town so here you see a close future closer to the gates here a Cathedral completely and utterly hedged in in the middle of a town whereas if you go to Milan there's no wall there's no nothing there it is in your face showing off you don't have to go through anything inside so this tradition perhaps isn't quite enough to explain why the London Guildhall is too reticent building compared with somewhere like Bremen but it does explain that there is a totally tradition the different tradition in England of placing your public buildings within cities so there is the concept of the precinct but I think to get to the heart of why the Guildhall looked as it did we need to consider something else and that is the English love of processions now when you look at English public and ceremonial architecture before about 1700 you'll see that the English basically always preferred altar are to architecture magnificent dress Velvets pearls laces horse trappings banners trumpets flags litters and above all extravagant number of attendants were the stuff of English royal and civic pageantry here is that famous painting at Hampton Court the embarkation Henry the 8th getting onto his boat and it oops and here you see great parade of courtiers when people came to the Tudor Court what they commented on most of all was the extraordinary number of people rest dressed in extraordinary rich clothes and this is the coronation procession of Edward the 6th so here is the Tower of London here is the the city this isn't Paul's Cathedral and here is the procession going through the streets going down here and here going around here around here around here down here to Westminster and here are you know thousands of people all watching people hanging out of their windows their houses draped with tapestries and carpets flags this is what the English really liked and the medieval streets of London were not just functional arteries for conveying people and goods they were also ceremonial routes they were the pathways for religious and civic processions that studied the annual calendar and central to this was this concept that I've been talking about of the precinct and the linkages between the individual precincts in the city and so the clergy at st. Paul's Cathedral would process around their precinct on feast days of the year and during wit week there was a huge diocesan wide procession round the whole city now this isn't sin Paul's Cathedral this isn't even an English manuscript but what it shows is an ecclesiastical procession going round a a church and here is Cardinal Wolsey riding on his donkey he's here Lord Chancellor and he's in a procession he is processing from his house at York place down and King Street to Westminster Hall going through the gate of the precinct of Westminster Palace to the court of star chamber in the Great Hall where he's going to sit in judgment and here the court cases so these processions from precinct to precinct to absolutely vital but I think that the thing that is really interesting is the way that the Guildhall precinct linked into the rest of the city so the mayor the sheriff's and the Ottoman would process from the Guildhall from their precinct to sandport its precinct and back again on Christmas Day and they would do it on seven other major feast days every year and from the 12th century monarchs to would process from Westminster their precinct to Street pools which they regarded as the great public arena for public royal pomp and spectacle and on the 28th of October all three great London precincts were linked together as the newly elected row lord mayor mayor as he was then he wasn't Lord Mayor by then turned mayor would ride from the guild hall to Westminster Palace to take the oath of the Exchequer and then ride from Westminster Palace just sent Paul's to offer prayers before returning to the guild hall but although this love of entourage gets us closer to understanding the guild hall it doesn't quite get us all the way because there's also the issue of status and precedent other than the members of his own family the only one of his subjects with whom monarchs ever dined in state was the Lord Mayor of London his Queen Victoria the mayor enjoyed exceptional status within the city everyone other than the king himself had to give way to him there even the brothers of King Henry the fifth were forced to sit next door to the mayor in the city and not above him Matthew Philip who was mayor in 1460 three-to-four walked out of a banquet that was given in his honor by the king's sergeants because the Earl of Worcester had been accorded precedence he went straight home he sat down to such a massive feast that the sergeants who by then had turned up to apologise were first dazzled then embarrassed then horrified and then ashamed these facts would not have been lost on Richard Whittington nor on John Carpenter the common clerk of the city and Whittington's close friend and executor the common Clark was the permanent paid officer of the city in charge of the Secretariat and of record-keeping and carpenter was responsible for compiling something known as the Liebherr opus a compendium of law and custom within the of London so as Whittington and crops ttan embarked on the reconstruction of the Guildhall precinct they have been very aware that they were dealing with a grouping of ceremonial buildings that were going to be used by an office second only to the monarch himself just as the Mayor was King in his little kingdom the square mile so the gilt Hall was to be his palace and this is why I suggest Whittington carpenter and Croxton all looked to Westminster both had huge great halls containing courts both had chapels both had a college of priests both were walled both were entered by gate houses and both entrance facades conveyed messages about the nature of power no other Civic Building in England was so endowed the guild hall complex was a deliberate and direct recreation of Westminster Palace but there is a difference and to understand this we need to look at one part of the guild hall that I had not yet mentioned and that is the porch which you see in Caroline's would be pre-construction here this structure faced guild hall yard it was the public face of england's wealthiest corporation and it looked it the whole surface was covered with blank our hating and niches containing four foot high statues at the top was Christ in majesty below on the next level were figures representing law and learning then flanking the central archway for more figures female figures representing the virtues of discipline justice fortitude and temperance all of them trampling Vice beneath their feet if you remember I said that Richard ii had covered his Great Hall with figures but for Richard there were two messages he was emphasizing first that he was chosen by God to rule and the second conveyed by the statues outside the Hall was that his blood could be traced back to Edward the Confessor for the mayor there was a totally different message God was at the top yes but beneath God was learning and the law upon which the city government had to rely and the figures below that were a message to the mayor that he needed discipline justice fortitude and temperance in order to exercise his high office well during the great fire both sinned Paul's Cathedral and the guild hall were damaged but not destroyed the guild wall as we know was repaired sorry there's the fire in case you're in any doubt the guild hall was repaired and the cathedral was rebuilt and in the process both of them lost their precincts sin poles now is the only historic Cathedral in England that doesn't have a cathedral closed it sits in the center of the city just like a continental Cathedral as a civic Monument and exactly the same thing happened to the guild hall we don't know who certainly was in charge of the reconstruction work there but it is likely to have been so Christopher Wren and Robert Robert Hooke away went the gate houses away went a corner of st. Lawrence jury and several other buildings and in their stead a new forecourt was built so there's there's the hall there's the porch and there is full court as you can tell someone has got the scales just a little bit and muddled up here this building was very much influenced by the architectural fashion of the day the obsession with copying their side the plans that that Wren had at Chelsea Hospital where there was a big forecourt in front and on his unfinished palace here which he designed at Winchester a huge big big forecourt this is what was the inspiration for the Guildhall yard is forecourt here giving the guild hall a setting well under chance the second of course England was a trading nation and London was a big and important European city but what was to happen after 1700 changed and everything London overtook Paris as the largest city in Europe and after century of growth and technological innovation the Royal Navy smashed the French fleet at the Battle of Trafalgar suddenly Trafalgar so suddenly Britannia in the words of Thomas Arms opera ruled the waves it was not only capital and goods that flooded into the port of London it was inspiration and imagination it was exotic ISM and it was new architectural styles now I'm a painter called William Hodges with the encouragement of warren hastings who was the first governor-general Bengal published a series of views of Indian buildings in 1785 2:8 and from 1795 a man called Thomas Daniel published a book called oriental scenery which had 144 aqua tints based on his extensive travels in India and included Mogul Hindu and medieval monuments and after 1803 when the British finally occupied Delhi the capital of the collapsing Moghul Empire tourists had access to the great monuments of the vicinity including Agra and the Taj Mahal which Daniels and others haven't been able to see before now the flood of these prints coming into London this great civilization that no one had seen before had a huge effect on both architects and patrons Architects were suddenly presented with new stylistic opportunities and patrons were able to display their taste and knowledge by using new styles and fascinatingly the city corporation was I think almost the first patron to seize the opportunity to use the new Hindu style mrs. felt at a time H I n D double-o the new Hindu style at the Guildhall and here it is here is the Guildhall porch designed by a george dance who is the city architect he was the man who'd built Newgate Prison and here he was after burden is very austere building creating this rupes well actually there was another there it is today I'll stick with the old photograph for him for a moment this extraordinary confection here with these sort of mad combination of of Hindu inspiration plus bits of Greek Revival past bits of gothic plus of course that the structure that remained from the original medieval building and in fact the the structure that we have today what you see here was actually based on some of the engravings provided by Hodges now of course this is a wonderful example of eclecticism mixing of styles and historicism looking back into the past to inform the present but it was also a very self conscious choice because by 1788 the date in which this was completed London was unequivocally the center of world trade and goods and capital flowed back and forth from the indian sub-continent this new porch with its exotic references to india showed that the city wasn't a parochial or provincial economic force it was in fact a global trading power but what I think is interesting about this is that at the same time that the corporation commissioned this extraordinary porch from Jorge dance they also commissioned a new room for the meeting of the Court of Common Council this is what he built some spectacular wonderful room tragically demolished in 1908 an example of one of those rooms that if it had survived would be universally recognized as one of the most influential pieces of architecture of its time because this roof form here inspired John Soane to build his extraordinary interiors in the Bank of England and elsewhere but of course now it's gone it's lost lost to history but when it was completed in the 1780s it was the most elegant and it was the most original internal public space in the city of London and it was in an absolutely modern style this wasn't at all an essay in eclecticism or historicism or any other ISM like the porch outside in other words the corporation felt it had no need to take the Hindu style to his heart the Hindu style was all about external projection about external image and perception it was an advertisement for the outward looking attitude of the city's governing body however despite this architectural flourish on the outside I'm talking about the porch the corporation was as much if not more about the protection of its ancient rights and privileges about reinforcing the closed shop that was cities that the city's government as it was about advertising it's and commercial and virility and as a result the corporation became increasingly obsessed with its medieval origins and the next changes in the Guildhall reflected this intense interest in the 1860s the city architect was the great Sir Horace Jones and he started the process of undoing some of the 18th century alterations to the medieval guild hall and he started regatta sizing it he was also commissioned to build an extension to the building for a museum and a library which you see here there's guild hall there's the library and museum attached to it these are were really impressive buildings completed in 1872 but what you can't see which Horace Jones did because it was destroyed in 1940 was the most important addition to the complex complex which was his astonishing though there's the inside of these so there's the inside of the library of course that still exists today you can still go in there and see it the bookcases have gone because the libraries moved but this is the extraordinary a building that Horace Jones built the council chamber the center of the guild hall a sort of 12 sided gothic chapter house with an iron frame soaring up this extraordinary and great dome on the top the heart of the governance of the City of London in this medieval izing building giving the message that nobody could escape that the city was the oldest god a body in the country well the reason of course we don't have that fine building today is because the war Second World War and destroyed it and the architect chosen to rebuild the Guildhall afterwards was Sir Giles Gilbert Scott the architect of Liverpool Anglican Cathedral but perhaps better known to this audience here as the architect of Bankside power station now Tate Modern and he repaired the medieval guild hall guild hall with great care but had much less respect for the other things on the site this were swept away and he I'm sorry about this intelligent a picture myself I pinched it from somebody else and but anyway you can see and these are the administrative buildings on the north side of the guild hall that took their place and these build these new offices were of course absolutely essential the corporation like all other local authorities after the war was taking on a much wider range of range of responsibilities and these required matching by managing by professional officers and this building to the north side of the medieval Hall I'm actually rather a fan of and I think you can see a little bit of tape modern in the careful careful ii designed and brickwork this very sparing use of of stonework and a sort of fusion of architectural styles and with an eye of faith loops with an eye of faith you can sort of see an echo of the Guildhall part porch on the other side and this building is a clever building because it's built at a time when there were very very few building materials it's built in 1955 to 1958 and it's makes quite a big impression with quite a a little amount of material well when Sir Giles died in 1960 rather and remarkably his son Richard Gilbert Scott took things on from the corporation the reconstruction of the guild hall was far from complete and he turned his attention to the guild hall yard now this is obviously an earlier and plan but here you see the guild hall and just to remind you how incredibly narrow and the guild hall yard was in the 1950s it was just literally that wide it was so narrow that a London taxi with its brilliant turning circle couldn't turn around in it if a taxi went in like that it had to reverse out and as you can imagine this caused complete chaos on ceremonial occasions and so the plan was to demolish this sort of conglomeration here of Victorian and Edwardian buildings to make a national fashionable precinct now it's very interesting that word precinct comes back in the early 1960s but of course the 1960s precinct shouldn't trigger in your minds an idea of a cathedral close it should trigger the idea of a 1960s shopping precinct because that was the inspiration and so the works of 1969 to 1975 included the demolition of church passage of George dances office range and the memorial drinking fountain of Sint Lawrence's jury and this enabled an enlarged and Guildhall yard so that's a little bit of focus to be created and the design involved this very brilliant ambulatory this sort of cloister that linked the medieval guild hall with the modern office block which was to contain the library which is going to move from the Victorian building and the offices of the corporation and this ambulatory here this is cloister was actually based on the principle of fan vaulting the fan vaults of Heaven's Chapel etc and it was deliberately created to form a link between old and new a very very difficult thing to do but something I think was achieved rather well well the final stage in the hugely long expensive and ambitious post-war reconstruction of the guild hall began in 1997 again under Richard Gilbert Scott with dy Davis associates on the side and this was a the final new building oh that's the the library from the side here we are which was to be on the site of the old bomb dalip damaged guild hall art gallery courts of law and chapel and this building now of course acts as the city's art gallery now what I think is so interesting about all these post-war and changes to the Guildhall site was that they had the effect of opening it up again during the 19th century it had become more enclosed it become boxed in by quite frankly not very good Victorian buildings what the corporation did in the 1970s was to open up this great precinct said why did this happen was it because the building was now gradually becoming democratized as the corporation modernised itself didn't want to open up its face to the public just as dances porch had been an advertisement of the city traders of the global reach of the city was the new forecourt a sign of a newly democratic institution embracing the modern world maybe or was it to solve a more prosaic and mundane problem actually the driving force was that the corporation wanted to build a forecourt that would allow hundreds of people to arrive by taxi at great banquets the Queen to arrive in her Rolls Royce and the Lord Mayor's coach to do a turn in front of his guild hall this ladies and gentlemen was a traffic scheme the dominating theme in town planning of its age it was about the motorcar not and the smooth organization of civic ceremonial but I think that this had all changed quite a lot by 1997 I was the director of this museum the Museum of London in those days and the corporation was acutely aware that it did need to modernize and it did need to share the great riches that it had in terms of art architecture and culture more widely while the Guildhall Yard had not been a democratizing at the guild hall the guild hall art gallery which you see here unquestionably was this was a totally first-rate building to show the corporation's collections to the public of course it could double as a venue but its raison d'etre was public access well where does that leave us and tonight well despite attempts over the ages the mayor of course now the Lord Mayor is still king in his kingdom and the guild hall is still his official palace the very fact that the guild hall is still in use shows that the corporation is deeply aware of its ancient roots and ancient privileges and unquestionably the guild hall is representative of both but the guilt or yard today reflects not the desire of the corporation to ape royal architecture and symbolism but thanks to the reconstruction completed in 2000 it does I think genuinely represent the face of a modern democratic institution that's physically and in literally open to the public if you haven't had a look at the building recently I very much hope that my lecture this evening has inspired you to go out and have a poke around in the dark recesses of the guild hall thank you

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Keywords: gresham, gresham lecture, gresham talk, gresham event, gresham college lecture, gresham professor, gresham college professor, gresham visiting professor, doctor, Simon, Thurley, simon thurley, English Heritage, London heritage, heritage, architectural heritage, history, london history, british history, City of London, lord mayor, mayor of lonodn, guildhall of lonodn, guildhall, london, mayor, architecture

Id: oKxYVLlRra4

Length: 52min 46sec (3166 seconds)

Published: Wed Dec 02 2015