The Great Fire which we remember tomorrow famously destroyed much of the City but not the Guildhall. Here I share a little of its history:
While there is evidence of an earlier hall on the site, the present Guildhall Great Hall was built between 1411 and 1430 and was designed to be an impressive meeting space for our City. According to the London Metropolitan Archives it was probably inspired by Westminster Hall, the medieval hall which still survives adjacent to the Houses of Parliament.
When constructed it was the largest open space covered by one roof in medieval England apart from Westminster Hall. There are no surviving building accounts but passing references to its construction show it was built to a higher specification than London’s medieval parish churches. As an example of the high standard of construction, Richard Whittington's executors paid £30 for paving the floor with Purbeck marble.
We do not know for sure what form the Great Hall's original roof took as there is scant evidence; historians however now think it was a tall pitched wooden roof. The Great Fire gutted Guildhall Chapel, which stood on the eastern side of the Yard, and destroyed the City's working offices around Guildhall itself. The fire also destroyed the Guildhall roof. Thomas Vincent (a London puritan minister) said of it that "[T]he sight of Guildhall was a fearful spectacle which stood for several hours together, after the fire had taken it, without flames (I suppose because the timber was such solid oake), in a bright shining coale as if it had been a Pallace of gold or a great building of burnished brass."
The Great Hall's splendid heraldic stained glass windows were destroyed too as was all the interior woodwork and the giant statues of Gog and Magog. The City administration moved to Sir Thomas Gresham's house, the home of Gresham College on Bishopsgate (roughly where Tower 42 now stands) and met there to organise London's rebuilding as Guildhall could not be used. The Great Hall was restored by Peter Mills, incorporating much of the surviving medieval fabric from 1667 and completed in 1671; the cost of rebuilding the whole Guildhall complex was £37,000.
Happily the splendid hall is still in use today for City functions and I hope at some point you stop to see it for yourself.
