Deptford Town Hall
Deptford Town Hall is a municipal building in New Cross Road, Deptford, London. It is a Grade II listed building.History
The building was commissioned to replace the aging Vestry of St. Paul, Deptford. The new building, which was designed by Henry Vaughan Lanchester, James Stewart and Edwin Alfred Rickards in the Baroque style and built by Holloway Brothers, was opened in July 1905. Statues of four naval figures, Sir Francis Drake, Robert Blake, Horatio Nelson and an unnamed contemporary admiral, were designed by Henry Poole, and erected on the front of the building. A weather vane in the shape of a galleon was placed on top of the clock tower.
During the First World War, the town hall was infamous for holding all its trials of conscientious objectors in secret. This controversial practice was more recently explored in the film, Devils on Horseback, released in 2018.
In the bombing of the Second World War, a V-2 rocket destroyed a Woolworths store on the opposite side of the street killing 160 people in the shop with the blast superficially damaging the town hall itself.
The building was established as the headquarters of the Metropolitan Borough of Deptford but ceased to be the local seat of government when the enlarged London Borough of Lewisham was formed in 1965. It was used as a workspace for some council departments until it was acquired by Goldsmiths College in 2000.
