Leeds Civic Hall

Leeds Civic Hall is a municipal building located in the civic quarter of Leeds, West Yorkshire, England. It replaced Leeds Town Hall as the administrative centre in 1933. The Civic Hall houses Leeds City Council offices, council chamber and a banqueting hall, and is a Grade II* listed building. A city landmark, two 2.3 metres (7 ft 7 in) high gold-leafed owls top its twin towers, decorations which are joined by four more owls on columns in Millennium Square, which sits to the front, and a gilded clock on both sides.

Since 1858, the Leeds City Council had met in the Town Hall, but over time, with the growth in local government responsibilities, more and more departments were moved into separate offices. This was inefficient and unsatisfactory, and with the forthcoming enlargement of the number of council seats from sixty-eight to a hundred, the whole question of accommodation had to be considered. A special sub-committee was established in 1929, and it was eventually decided that an entirely new building was required.

Due to the economic climate, it was pursued as a Keynesian project to provide work for labourers. Unemployment in Leeds was very high during the Depression, reaching 17% in 1930 and 21% in 1931. In mid-1930, two council aldermen approached the government to receive funding from the unemployed relief works programme, and were advised to get a detailed and costed scheme submitted as soon as possible, as the government was liable to fall at any time. While in London, they were given a recommendation for the architect E. Vincent Harris, whose Sheffield City Hall was under construction at the time. Harris was able to satisfy them that he could prepare all the necessary drawings and quantities within a matter of weeks as required. However, there was disapproval when the rest of the council learned of the appointment of a London architect, and the scheme hit a hitch when Harris insisted he would only design a building on a higher site than the Town Hall, rather than the council's preferred site on Headrow. A site between Portland Crescent and the General Infirmary on Calverley Street was agreed, the new hall to take the place of a block known as St James Square. Controversy arose at the time because of the use of white Portland stone contrasting with the then soot-blackened Town Hall.

Construction work began in September 1930, only slightly more than three months after the building's approval from the special sub-committee. This was a very rapid development compared to the Town Hall, which took three years between agreement for the hall in July 1850 and the laying of its foundation stone in August 1853. The building contract was awarded to Armitage & Hodgson of Leeds, which had carried out many important constructional contracts in the city, including the university and the Devonshire Hall. 90% of the workforce were unemployed locals - the council were successful in applying for the government's Unemployed Grants Committee funds - who worked in different teams for set periods of time in order to spread the work among the unemployed. The final cost was £360,000, the equivalent of £17 million in 2018.

The expanded city council was elected in November 1930, and met for its first three occasions at the Great Hall of the University of Leeds. Problems with acoustics in this venue meant that, following alterations to reduce the size of the public gallery, it returned to the Town Hall council chamber until the Civic Hall's opening two and a half years later. It was completed six months ahead of schedule and opened by King George V and Queen Mary on 23 August 1933, seventy-five years after the king's grandmother had opened the Town Hall. The ceremonial key used to open the Civic Hall was returned from New Zealand on 7 June 1993 after having been missing since 1933.

The gardens laid out in front of the Civic Hall once included the Coronation Fountain, erected in 1953 and demolished the following year. A plaque marking the golden jubilee (50th anniversary) of the building was unveiled on 23 August 1983 by Lord Mayor Martin Dodgson. The steps and paving in front of the main entrance were relaid in early 1994, using new blocks and slabs of Portland stone. The building was cleaned in 1994–95.

As ambitious as the Town Hall, but not quite as self confident. [...] The lack of four-square self-confidence was no doubt unavoidable. 1933 could no longer use the classical or the Baroque idiom with anything like the robust conviction of the Victorians. England in its official architecture clung to the mood of grandeur, but the bottom had fallen out of it. Yet the towers by their very thinness and duplication impress from a distance, and the oddities of detail – oddities imitated from Lutyens – are at least more acceptable than the deadly correctness of others of the incorrigible classicists of 1930.

— Nikolaus Pevsner