The Guildhall (and its environs)

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The Guildhall - forecourt and surrounding buildings

The Guildhall is the headquarters of the Corporation of London and is, in effect, the City of London's town hall.

The Guildhall stands among a quiet network of lanes south of the Barbican, northwest of the Bank of England and northeast of St Pauls Cathedral. The building itself is quite a rambling structure, parts of which date from 1411. It survived the Great Fire of London in 1666. As well as the Corporation of London the it houses the City of London's main reference library, a clock museum and - last but not least - the Great Hall, a venue for prestiguous civic fuctions. The hall is open to the public when not otherwise in use. The Guildhall lays more or less on the same site as the amphitheatre of the original Roman city, and its outline is picked out as a ring of decorative paving in the present Guildhall forecourt.

A water feature at the Guildhall

The Guildhall is surrounded by a network of quiet lanes featuring a fascinating and bewildering mix of architechtural styles - buildings old and new, larhe and small, elaborate and plain, ugly and beautiful. The lanes are narrow and haphazard and interspersed with little closes and gardens, lending the whole area an atmosphere of tranquility

The lanes adjacent to the Guildhall

Photographic note: Fujilabs insist that there is nothing wrong with these scans. I think they exhibit excessive digital noise in the darker areas. What do you, the viewers, think? Feedback welcome.
 

    The Guildhall website
    Map of Guildhall and aerial photos by Streetmap.co.uk
    Back to City of London index page


This page last updated 6th April 2002