Why London’s Mayor Is Moving Out of City Hall

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Anyone want to rent a city hall? Following a June 24 announcement by the city’s Mayor Sadiq Khan, London will soon have one to spare. In a bid to cut the city’s budget deficit, Khan has recommended that his offices and the headquarters of the London Assembly should move out of the eye-catching Norman Foster-designed blob they have inhabited since 2002. When its current lease comes up for renewal in 2021, the Greater London Authority will move to the altogether cheaper and less centrally located Crystal Building, located in the Royal Docks a few miles to the east. The move, Khan says, could save the city £55 million ($69 million) over five years, money that could be diverted into essential services that Londoners need far more than they do a splashy-looking political HQ.

The reasons behind the move are somewhat sobering. The city faces a £493 million ($615 million) budget shortfall, thanks in large part to the coronavirus pandemic’s deadening effect on business and household tax revenues. Mayor Khan has already had to fight for a £1.6 billion bailout from the UK national government to keep Transport for London, the city’s transit authority, solvent after lockdowns slashed ridership, and the clouds are unlikely to clear anytime soon. Khan is also under a lot of political pressure. As probably the most high-profile elected official from Britain’s opposition Labour Party, the mayor has faced sustained attacks from the Tory government of Prime Minister Boris Johnson. The Telegraph newspaper, to which Prime Minister Johnson long contributed as a columnist, has argued that the mayoralty should be scrapped altogether. In a climate when the mayor himself has taken a pay cut, the move from a glittering landmark to cheaper digs in a more far-flung neighborhood may be a strategic PR move. 

These London-specific conditions aside, the exodus from City Hall may form part of a global trend in office-space reshuffling. Governments at all levels are looking for cost savings, and municipal governments, like many private companies, have discovered that plenty of employees can happily work from home. Office spaces that are likely to remain only half-full as the coronavirus pandemic chugs on seem an obvious target for reducing costs. 

Especially when, as is the unusual case with London’s City Hall, the site is not on public land but leased from a private landowner. In the U.S., the state of Missouri is currently looking into how it can scale down its leased office space in Jefferson City while a third of state employees are still working from home. The city of San Bernardino, California, entirely shuttered its rented workspace to save money, just a few years after moving out of its historic City Hall because it was considered too vulnerable to earthquakes. “It’s getting difficult to explain to residents year after year why we haven’t figured out where City Hall is,” one councilman told local paper The Sun. 

Office shifts like this probably won’t be as seismic to local economies as those made by private companies — such as Silicon Valley tech giants considering relocating from the Bay Area. But the double role of city halls as workplaces and as metonyms that represent local government makes moving them more striking.

How much does the move matter for London? Not that much, necessarily. While London is an old city, its mayoral institutions and the buildings they inhabit are pretty new. The city has a Lord Mayor, whose position dates back to the Middle Ages and is currently quartered in an 18th century mansion. That office, however, is a purely ceremonial position with jurisdiction solely in the city’s longest-inhabited patch, the tiny financial district confusingly called the City of London. London in its entirety has only had a political body overseeing it all together (originally the London County Council, later the Greater London Council) since 1889, and that was abolished in 1986. As an institution, London’s current mayoralty dates back only to 2000, and since then it has shared power with boroughs that are considerably more powerful than their equivalents in Paris or New York. London also has much experience with seeing its municipal buildings vacated and retooled. When the Thatcher government abolished the Greater London Council, its spectacular headquarters overlooking the Houses of Parliament from across the River Thames — called County Hall — was transformed for a makeshift mess of different uses. It now includes hotels, offices and such delightful attractions as the Namco Funscape Amusement Arcade and Shrek’s Adventure London.

The loss of the current City Hall as a site of government is thus one Londoners have been prepared for by recent history. The building itself — commonly referred to in London as “The Testicle” or “The Glass Gonad,” due to its lopsided spherical silhouette — is not a landmark widely visited by Londoners, even if its lawns are the the best place in London to take a photo with Tower Bridge as a backdrop. Finding a suitable tenant for the building, which was purpose-built for city government, may indeed pose a headache for the Kuwaiti Sovereign Wealth Fund, which owns the building and surrounding area, but that isn’t necessarily an issue for the city or taxpayers. Shuffling away to a quieter dockside location might seem like a retreat with unwelcome symbolism — but the fact that London’s City Hall had to be leased from a private landowner already bore a weight of uncomfortable symbolism in itself. Meanwhile its removal to the Royal Docks could potentially see City Hall involved in the regeneration of an area that, while it lacks neither new buildings nor infrastructure, still sits fairly close to some of the most deprived areas in the city. 

Meanwhile, “The Crystal,” the spike-roofed events venue into which the mayoralty would move, has some qualities that may make it a more on-brand headquarters for Mayor Khan. Designed by Wilkinson Eyre Architects and completed in 2012, it’s billed  as “one of the world’s most sustainable buildings,” with solar water heating, a solar glass facade, and an energy management system created by Siemens that could burnish to the green reputation of Mayor Khan (even if he did recently approve a £1 billion sub-Thames road tunnel for a site nearby that was strongly criticized by environmentalists).

There’s one final advantage to the move. The Crystal lies next to East London’s Emirates Air Line, the spectacular and spectacularly useless cross-river gondola commissioned under Khan’s mayoral predecessor Boris Johnson that, following years of very low ridership, has gained a reputation as London’s most notorious infrastructural white elephant. With the mayor’s office and the London Assembly installed just below its creaking cables, perhaps commuting city workers can give the gondola a bit of action.

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