In the early 1980s, the Greater London Council (GLC) and its leader Ken Livingstone used to hang a huge banner showing the number of London’s unemployed on the curving frontage of its Edwardian baroque home, County Hall. It faced the Palace of Westminster directly, was updated every month and infuriated Margaret Thatcher. In 1986, her Conservative government abolished the GLC, leaving London as probably the only great metropolis in the world without a citywide authority.
It would be left to a later Labour government to restore some kind of London-wide government and, in 2000, it created the post of mayor. County Hall had been sold off in 1992, so the mayor needed a new office, and a new building was commissioned: the more American-sounding City Hall, sited on an old dock also on the south bank of the Thames (but in Southwark rather than Waterloo). Its architect was Norman Foster, then still flying high on the wings of the German fat eagle, the non-threatening logo he designed for the new Reichstag building in Berlin.
City Hall, formerly the home of the London Mayor and the Greater London Authority, designed by Norman Foster. Photo: Getty Images Historic England has just refused to grant City Hall listed status for a second time. The Greater London Authority and the London mayor moved out at the end of 2020 after the building’s Kuwaiti-owned landlords put up the rent.
They are now in The Crystal, a building designed for Siemens as a kind of high-tech showroom at the Royal .