AHMM has resuscitated the 18th-century Royal London Hospital, adapting and extending it into a flagship centre of east London civic life
The chief executive’s office at the new Tower Hamlets Town Hall offers an unusual take on civic interior design. A vintage x-ray screen looms behind the desk, while surgical lights hang from the ceiling. If this sounds more like an operating theatre than a modern local government workplace, that’s because it once was.
The town hall has been adapted by AHMM from the original Royal London Hospital, a building that dates back to the 1750s and has a rich history, featuring several major surgical breakthroughs, as well as First World War heroine Edith Cavell (who trained and worked here) and Joseph Meyrick, the Elephant Man (who spent his final years living in rooms in the attic).
The opportunity to repurpose it arose after the Royal London moved to a purpose-built facility behind the site in 2012. To make the hospital fit for a 21st-century civic administration, AHMM has stripped out and refurbished the interiors and wrapped it in new-build elements to the east and south, including a six-storey, exposed concrete-frame block behind the main building.
The upper levels of the extension provide open-plan office space for 2,470 council staff plus partner organisations, while the ground floor houses a new council chamber and meeting facilities. As a result, the council, which was previously housed in a rented office in East India Dock on the borough’s south-eastern edge, now owns and occupies a building that boasts the longest and most distinguished frontage on Whitechapel Road, Tower Hamlets’ bustling heart.
The grade II-listed hospital gave the architects challenges to grapple with, but also plenty of source material for creative inspiration. “We did a lot of research into the history of the hospital, trying to understand what the original finishes were, what the colours were,” says Sam Scott, associate director at AHMM. “Then, once we started to strip it out, we really got to understand how the whole building was put together.”
The original Georgian building has had several major extensions, including an eastern wing, known as the Grocers’ Wing, by Charles Barry Jnr, completed in 1876, and a neoclassical entrance portico added by Rowland Plumbe in 1890. An Arts and Crafts rooftop extension (also by Plumbe, 1906) added two conservatory-like operating theatres that project from the front elevation.
When the team arrived on site, they found an institutional warren of plasterboard and peeling wallpaper. But gradually the building beneath was revealed: zinc plates from the original chimney flues, purple-hued brick walls from the Georgian structure and steel beams from the Victorian additions. When exterior crinkly tin cladding was removed, it revealed a tapestry of masonry from different eras. Perhaps most surprisingly, the grand portico was found to be an early reinforced-concrete structure, even down to the stone-like columns that dominate the frontage.
AHMM’s approach has been to celebrate these relics as much as possible, painting old bits of steel structure bright red, exposing the patched-up brickwork and using the orange and terracotta terrazzo in the operating theatre floor as a basis for the new wayfinding scheme. But for this to work, the new-build elements needed a calmer aesthetic. “There’s an immediate contrast,” says Scott. “The ground floor is all exposed, very stripped back, very simple. That creates a foil to the really gnarly Georgian brickwork of the existing building.”
They decided to place smaller, more private spaces such as meeting rooms in the already cellular hospital building to avoid major interventions in the heritage structure. The extension therefore needed to have bigger, more flexible floorplates to accommodate open offices and the showpiece council chamber. The main six-storey volume is set out on a 9m x 9m grid with 325mm-deep in-situ flat slabs. These are supported on 250mm-thick in-situ “thin walls” at the perimeter.
The concrete slabs and columns are exposed throughout the extension. The mix includes 25% GGBS, creating a lighter finisher, and was cast using plywood with an MDO overlay, leaving a flat surface with no board grain. AHMM set out the board layout on the slabs and the core walls to make sure joints and tie holes lined up.
Scott says the architects were happy with a degree of variation in the surface, particularly where the soffits are set back behind exposed services and acoustic baffles. However, in some more visible areas, such as perimeter columns and some core walls, precast elements have been used to enhance consistency and define the joints. In the most prominent spaces, AHMM wrote an enhanced concrete specification, specifying aggregates and cement from a single source, limiting blowholes and stipulating exact tolerances. This is evident on the edge of the first-floor soffits, where a razor-sharp recess was required to insert lighting between the slab and the balustrade.
An enhanced specification was also required in the council chamber. Here, a grid of immense 900mm-deep coffers achieves an 18m x 18m clear span, despite having to support six storeys of offices above. The team created a scale mock-up to test this highly complex structural solution, which also had to convey the civic grandeur of the space. “The other finishes in the chamber are really stripped back,” points out Scott. “The flooring is quite modest, not highly polished in the way you might imagine for a council chamber.” The wall panels, meanwhile, are made from a product comprised of bamboo and recycled paper, which is durable but quite functional – it is more often used for skatepark ramps.
The extension connects back to the hospital via a three-storey top-lit atrium, which allows light to wash over the brickwork of the original south elevation. A lime wash has been added to tone down some of the variation in the old masonry, while ensuring that the building’s history stays in the foreground.
The biggest intervention in the hospital building is to the Grocers’ Wing, where the floorplates have been stripped out to make a double-height atrium. This now forms the main public entrance. “We wanted to create a number of different routes through the building,” says Scott. “The Victorian facade is a bit bombastic and shouts ‘front door’, but is not necessarily that welcoming, so we’ve moved the entrance so that it directly faces the new Elizabeth Line station.”
In order to establish a more open public face, a continuous glazed frontage has been installed at ground level. “The Grocer’s Wing has quite a stately facade with really good quality brickwork, but the base of it had been completely ruined,” says Scott. A Pynford beam – a technique more often used in foundation work – was cast like a lintel along the full length of the facade, so that the ground-floor brickwork could be removed entirely without compromising the three upper storeys.
Tower Hamlets council is aiming to reduce its direct emissions by 75% by 2025. To this end, its new town hall is an all-electric building, which has achieved BREEAM Excellent. Heating and hot water is supplied by two air-source heat pumps, while the thermal mass of the exposed concrete will help to regulate internal temperatures.