County Hall is an absolute mess of a building on the South Bank, London. Building started in 1911 and took 11 years until it first opened as the headquarters for the LCC (London County Council), and later the GLC (Greater London Council, not the Welsh rap group unfortunately)
It's been continually built on and is now made up of several blocks, all of different shapes and sizes, and houses two hotels, an aquarium, the new London Dungeons, several restaurants, some flats and the London Eye experience.
Navigating the rooftop was a joke, involving infinite amounts of ladders, scaffold rigs, staircases and dodgy pipe shimmies to get to the curved crescent-like feature at the front of the building. Definitely worth it, but felt like more of a workout than we were anticipating.
We'd been out and about looking at some other places, and decided to check this place out on a whim as Gabe had spotted scaff going up. We approached it around 2am and didn't get back down until around 5ish just as dawn was cracking. Popped open a cheeky breakfast can and headed home for a couple hours shut eye before work.
It's fairly close to the London Eye. A bit too close in fact, and even the fisheye struggled to capture it from up close, but the views over towards HoPa and the rest of Southwark were pretty nice. Not a huge building but it goes to show how much location counts more than height.
And ironically, despite the prime location and impressive(ish) design the majority of the building lies empty, including two entire floors. The original Council debating chamber from the LCC and GLC days are still locked away inside somewhere, but we didn't even attempt to access it, knowing that it's located on the ground floor right in the heart of the building. It's still used for filming purposes, and you can apparently hire it out. Fairly sure this is it below us in the octagonal building.
Anyway, a good building to tick off the list, and an enjoyable night out once again. Cheers Gabe.
It's been continually built on and is now made up of several blocks, all of different shapes and sizes, and houses two hotels, an aquarium, the new London Dungeons, several restaurants, some flats and the London Eye experience.
Navigating the rooftop was a joke, involving infinite amounts of ladders, scaffold rigs, staircases and dodgy pipe shimmies to get to the curved crescent-like feature at the front of the building. Definitely worth it, but felt like more of a workout than we were anticipating.
We'd been out and about looking at some other places, and decided to check this place out on a whim as Gabe had spotted scaff going up. We approached it around 2am and didn't get back down until around 5ish just as dawn was cracking. Popped open a cheeky breakfast can and headed home for a couple hours shut eye before work.
It's fairly close to the London Eye. A bit too close in fact, and even the fisheye struggled to capture it from up close, but the views over towards HoPa and the rest of Southwark were pretty nice. Not a huge building but it goes to show how much location counts more than height.
And ironically, despite the prime location and impressive(ish) design the majority of the building lies empty, including two entire floors. The original Council debating chamber from the LCC and GLC days are still locked away inside somewhere, but we didn't even attempt to access it, knowing that it's located on the ground floor right in the heart of the building. It's still used for filming purposes, and you can apparently hire it out. Fairly sure this is it below us in the octagonal building.
Anyway, a good building to tick off the list, and an enjoyable night out once again. Cheers Gabe.
