Design for Municipal Building (Town Hall), Norwich, Norfolk: bird's-eye perspective looking northwest, 1933

C.H. James RA (1893 - 1953)

RA Collection: Art

C. H. James and S. Rowland Pierce won the competition ro design Norwich's town hall and municipal buildings in 1932 but financial difficulties resulted in the building not being completed and opened until 1938.

Today the building is deemed as Art Deco, but when it was designed and built the direct inspiration was Swedish Modernism, a movement very fashionable for public buildings in Britain at that time. The slender central columns of the building, lending the design its greatest elegance, were directly inspired by those of Stockholm Concert Hall (1923–26) by Ivar Tengbom Hon RA. The tower with its cupola and the hooded windows at either end of the principal façade are features borrowed from Stockholm City Hall (1911–23) by Ragnar Östberg Hon RA.

James submitted this drawing as his Diploma Work upon his election to full Royal Academician in 1946. The sheet, in his own hand, dates from 1933, during the design stage of the project. The power of the drawing lies in its bird’s-eye view, done in axonometric projection to permit an angled vantage to emphasise the plan.

James was elected to the Royal Academy but not Pierce, despite the two having closely comparable abilties and experience. This was because the institution then upheld a tradition that architectural partners could not both be Academicians. In reputation, James perhaps had the edge over Pierce, having trained under Sir Edwin Lutyens PRA and then worked in the offices of Parker and Unwin, leaders of the Garden City Movement. Also, from 1919 to 1925, James, with his first partner C. M. Hennell, had established a reputation as an architect of good housing schemes in Welwyn Garden City and Swanpool Garden Suburb in Lincoln.

(Text adapted from Neil Bingham, Masterworks: Architecture at the Royal Academy of Arts, London, 2010, pp. 128-9)