Nottingham Council House


Nottingham Council House is the city hall of Nottingham, England. The high dome that rises above the city is the centrepiece of the skyline and presides over the Old Market Square. It is a Grade II* listed building.

History

The Council House was commissioned to replace the former Nottingham Exchange. It was designed by Thomas Cecil Howitt in the Neo-Baroque style and built between 1927 and 1929.
Housed within the dome the affectionately-nicknamed ‘Little John’ hour bell – the deepest toned clock bell in the United Kingdom, weighing over – whose strike can be heard for a distance of seven miles.
The foundation stone was laid by Alderman Herbert Bowles, on 17 March 1927. The total cost of the building at the time was £502,876. By the time the bill was finally cleared in 1981, the total including interest was £620,294. The building was officially opened by the Prince of Wales on 22 May 1929.
The building has staged many high-profile occasions with royalty, statesmen and women, and stars of the stage and screen. Both the FA Cup in 1959, and the European Cup in 1979 and 1980, have been held aloft from its balcony.
Since Nottingham City Council relocated councillors’ offices to Loxley House in 2010, the Council House is seldom used for day-to-day administrative functions. From April 2011, the building also now serves as the chief Register Office for Births, Marriages and Deaths in the City.

Exterior

The Council House and Exchange Buildings are constructed of Portland Stone from the same quarry used by Sir Christopher Wren for St. Paul's Cathedral in London.
The terrace overlooking the Old Market Square has eight massive columns, above are 21 figures representing the activities of the Council, also modelled by Joseph Else FRBS, the Principal of the Nottingham School of Art from 1923 to 1939. The frieze behind depicts traditional local crafts such as bell founding, mining and alabaster carving.

Interior

The interior of the building is elaborately decorated:

Ground Floor

The most striking visual element of the building, and in itself an iconic symbol of the City. The golden ball on the very top of the dome stands above the Old Market Square below.
Apart from Little John, the famous bell and its clock mechanism which was manufactured and installed by William W. Cope of the famous Cope clockmaking family.
The hour bell has been named 'Little John' since the building opened. The bell was cast in 1928, by the world-famous bellfounders John Taylor & Co. of Loughborough. At in weight, 'Little John' is the 4th heaviest founded by John Taylor & Co. and the 6th heaviest in the British Isles. The E tone is the deepest, for a non-swinging clock bell in the British Isles.

The Exchange (Exchange Arcade)

The ground floor is predominantly an upmarket fashion-dominated shopping mall – now called ‘The Exchange’ in honour of the Nottingham Exchange – having had an image makeover in 2005. The original name of Exchange Arcade is still used by many local people however. Retailing space was included in the design to fund the Corporation’s construction of the building, during the Great Depression and remained under council control until sold in 1985 and redeveloped as a shopping centre.
This part of the building has been in private hands since that time, and is currently owned by a Pension Fund. Each shop has its own basement showroom or storage facilities, deliveries being made via an underground roadway, served by a vehicular lift on Cheapside. This service area was originally the fresh produce hall, and received natural light via pavement lights in the floor of the arcade above. The locations of those lights can still be seen, marked by the 1985-vintage terracotta tile strips which replaced them, interspersed between the York stone paving slabs. The paved areas were replaced in 2014 with identical York stone.
Painted murals underneath the Council House dome feature:
Each mural was the work of local artist Noel Denholm Davis. The artist used local celebrities as models. Thus T. Cecil Howitt himself appears in the guise of William the Conqueror’s surveyor, and Notts County F.C. goalkeeper Albert Iremonger as Little John. The inscription around the base of the dome reads: “The Corporation of Nottingham erected this building for counsel and welcome, and to show merchandise and crafts”.
The condition of these murals has deteriorated in recent years, largely through the ingress of water. The Robin Hood mural was particularly severely damaged in this way. In June 2018 Nottingham City Council finished a complete restoration of the damaged murals in a process which took about three months.

Statuary

Much of the external statuary is by Joseph Else, Principal of the Nottingham School of Art. Else was responsible for the famous lions guarding the entrance, for the frieze above the Ballroom windows and for the figures in the principal façade’s pediment. A pub overlooking the Square is now named after Else.

The Lions

Created by Joseph Else, the two art-deco lions each weigh and stand guard on either side of the entrance steps. They are similar in design to the lions used to publicise the British Empire Exhibition of 1924/25. Joseph Else named them, ‘Agamemnon’ and ‘Menelaus’, after the elder son and younger son of King Atreus of Mycenae, from Greek mythology. Alternative colloquial names are, ‘Leo’ and ‘Oscar’. The colloquialism, ‘Meet you by the lions’, became part of the local dialect from the beginning of their existence, and is in fact, frequently demonstrated by the sight of people meeting and greeting nearby on a regular basis.

Sculpture Groups around the Dome

These groups were created by Joseph Else and three former students of the School of Art. All the sculptors were born and raised in Nottingham.
Howitt himself was in no doubt that the use of classical lines would mean that it would not look dated in a few years’ time.
A scathing criticism came from Nikolaus Pevsner in his Buildings of England: Nottinghamshire ;

“Not much can be said in defence of this kind of neo-Baroque display at a date when the Stockholm Town Hall was complete and a style congenial to the C20 established. Wren has to answer for much, once the connection between Greenwich and this dome is noted. The Ionic columniation is no more inspiring or truthful than the interiors. The only positive interest lies in the plan of the building. Its centre is a shopping arcade of great height with a glass roof, and shops run all along the ground floor on the N and S sides.”