Tower Hamlets Town Hall is a municipal facility in a building known as Mulberry Place, in Nutmeg Lane, Poplar, London. It is the headquarters of

Tower Hamlets London Borough Council Tower Hamlets London Borough Council is the local authority for the London Borough of Tower Hamlets in Greater London, England. The council is unusual in that its executive function is controlled by a directly elected mayor of Tower Hamlets, curr ...

History

The London Borough of Tower Hamlets was formed in 1965 by the merger of the Metropolitan Boroughs of

Bethnal Green Bethnal Green is an area in the East End of London northeast of Charing Cross. The area emerged from the small settlement which developed around the common land, Green, much of which survives today as Bethnal Green Gardens, beside Cambridge Heat ...

, Poplar and

Stepney Stepney is a district in the East End of London in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. The district is no longer officially defined, and is usually used to refer to a relatively small area. However, for much of its history the place name appl ...

. The new authority was initially based at Bethnal Green Town Hall. In the early 1990s, the council decided to move to a more modern building, on the site of the former East India Import Dock. The new Town Hall, completed in 1992 and occupied the following year, was built by the Nordic Construction Company, with Birse Construction the main contractor. The new building formed part of a larger development of four linked blocks, designed by Sten Samuelson and the Beaton Thomas Partnership in the Modernist style. The design made extensive use of reflective glazing and pink

Sardinia Sardinia ( ; it, Sardegna, label=Italian, Corsican and Tabarchino ; sc, Sardigna , sdc, Sardhigna; french: Sardaigne; sdn, Saldigna; ca, Sardenya, label=Algherese and Catalan) is the second-largest island in the Mediterranean Sea, after ...

granite Granite () is a coarse-grained (phaneritic) intrusive igneous rock composed mostly of quartz, alkali feldspar, and plagioclase. It forms from magma with a high content of silica and alkali metal oxides that slowly cools and solidifies undergro ...

. The name Mulberry Place commemorates the construction of Mulberry harbours in the dock during the

Second World War World War II or the Second World War, often abbreviated as WWII or WW2, was a world war that lasted from 1939 to 1945. It involved the vast majority of the world's countries—including all of the great powers—forming two opposin ...

, and reflects the sprig of

mulberry ''Morus'', a genus of flowering plants in the family Moraceae, consists of diverse species of deciduous trees commonly known as mulberries, growing wild and under cultivation in many temperate world regions. Generally, the genus has 64 identif ...

included in the boroughs coat of arms in recognition of the East End's weaving heritage. The ship bell of the

sloop A sloop is a sailboat with a single mast typically having only one headsail in front of the mast and one mainsail aft of (behind) the mast. Such an arrangement is called a fore-and-aft rig, and can be rigged as a Bermuda rig with triangular sa ...

HMS Crane is placed in the Town Hall foyer. The ship was adopted by the Borough of Bethnal Green during the

and the connection with the ship and its crew has been maintained ever since. In February 2015 the council acquired the old

Royal London Hospital The Royal London Hospital is a large teaching hospital in Whitechapel in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets. It is part of Barts Health NHS Trust. It provides district general hospital services for the City of London and Tower Hamlets and s ...

and announced plans to convert it for use as the new Whitechapel Civic Centre to which the council would relocate when it became available. In 2018, the Mulberry Place building's owner LaSalle Investment, which charges £5 million per year in rent for Mulberry Place, announced that it would convert the building into flats after the council leaves in 2022.

References

{{reflist Buildings and structures in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets City and town halls in London Government buildings completed in 1992