FAQs

By October 1945, the Council launched its development plans for the next 50 years.  As well as the Civic Centre, plans now included a greatly widened Wellesley Road and Park Lane with an underpass underneath George Street, a flyover across High Street and Old Town to Duppas Hill, a new bus station, car parks and many new office buildings funded by private development.

Although this was modified, it led firstly to a Town Planning Scheme, then to the Croydon Development Plan of 1951. In 1954, the Government ended building restrictions, setting off an office building boom in the South East, encouraging the movement of businesses and workers out of central London. To avoid more delay, a private Bill was promoted in parliament and became the Croydon Corporation Act of 1956. Initial progress on redevelopment was slow due to the continuing shortage of men, materials and money.

Building materials and styles had changed since the war as the shortage of steel and  emergence of concrete as an alternative led architects to look at new ways of construction.  Slabs could be poured onsite and a lot of facing panels were made of precast concrete in out-of-town factories and transported easily by road or rail and assembled on site.  Brutalist features such as visible construction materials and unusual formations of window arrangement and external decoration became the signs of a new phase of Croydon’s development.

Initial work started on the eastern side of Wellesley Road and Park Lane on the site of the former Public Halls and the eastern part of George Street. Building lines were pushed back to widen the roads and office developments included Norfolk House in 1959 followed by Suffolk House and Essex House. This area became known as Little East Anglia.  

Norfolk House, designed by Howell and Brooks, was the first tall building to be built in Croydon, with an 11-storey block and lower 7, 4 and 2 storeys running around this central core from Wellesley Road to George Street. It comprised a wide range of shops at street level. Key features are angled windows in chevron pattern at the first-floor level and light brick cladding.  

Suffolk House was built in association with Essex House by Raglan Squire and partners in 1960 to 1961 as part of the first generation of office buildings.  Suffolk House is 4 storeys, with black marble sill-bands and curtain walling. It has splayed corners which were a planning requirement and were condemned by the Croydon Advertiser as “destroying the rectangular shape of the building”.  Essex House, was an 11-storey slab, tapered at both ends, standing on a podium with an inner courtyard.  Initially, it was notable for the green colour of its curtain walling; but this gradually faded and the building was empty by 1991 and demolished in 1998.  A recent 44-floor housing development, Ten Degrees, now stands on this site and is currently Croydon’s tallest building.

After the building of Norfolk House in 1959, the focus turned towards the development of shops and offices between Park Lane and High Street. The area was previously occupied by the Greyhound Hotel, a former coaching inn fronting onto the High Street, but with its yard and outbuildings extending back to Park Lane. The complete development of the 6-acre site was undertaken by Charles Ellis and financed by the Church Commissioners. 

This development included Katharine House, Ellis House, Park House, Pearl Assurance House, St George’s House, The Greyhound Hotel and St George’s Walk and took three years to build between 1962 and 1965. It was meant to be the showpiece of the new Croydon, architecturally as well as economically. 

 St George’s House is often credited to Borough Engineer Allan Holt’s desire for a really tall, landmark building in Croydon. Asked what he meant by “really tall”, he is said to have responded, rather glibly “twice the height of Norfolk House”. The resulting building, 23 storeys to Norfolk House’s 11 storeys, was the result.  It stands 260 feet high and was the tallest building in Croydon until 1970. The building dominated the town centre and at its opening, The Mayor of Croydon remarked that Nestlé, who occupied the building, could be excused for believing that they owned Croydon. 

 It was built in concrete with vertical lines of white capstone and brick infilling to very high standards including, for example, cavity floors to take computer cables. A new building at the foot of the tower block was added to relocate the Greyhound Hotel and is still remembered with affection by music lovers, playing host to the likes of David Bowie, Queen and Deep Purple. Staff at the Fairfield Halls remember the battle of the bands, between themselves and the Greyhound on a Sunday night, when they would try to catch the highlights at both venues. It never regained its pre-move status and after various changes in image, became the Blue Orchid nightclub in 1989 before closing in 2004. 

 St George’s Walk, the shopping precinct below, was slow at attracting tenants, and units were small. This meant that those who did set up businesses there were often small independent and specialist shops. It suffered from the outset from a wind-tunnel effect and was soon superseded by the nearby Whitgift Centre. Attempts to improve the surroundings included roofing over part of the mall and also installing advertising boards at angles to limit the wind-tunnel effect. 

 Those who lived in Croydon during the sixties and seventies may remember the Pasta San Georgio restaurant, the Panino and Sergio’s sandwich bars as well as a model shop, Jewellers, and hairdressers like Swankers and Shears. 

Other shops, restaurants and cafes in St George’s Walk that evoke fond memories for some Croydonians include ‘A wool and sewing shop that used a grabber to reach the wool; the Madhouse clothes store that blasted out music; a camping shop; suits from Ralph Taylors; and lunch from the bakers shop where you could buy a huge cheese baguette and a strawberry tart with a 15p luncheon voucher.’

 Several plans for redevelopment have been considered, including Park Place, a new shopping area across Park Street and into George Street in 2005, and Queens Square by the Chinese R&F Properties Group in 2018. A large proportion of the site has now been completely demolished, bringing to an end a piece of Croydon’s history that lasted just over fifty years.

The Fairfield Halls building is named after the plot of land it’s built on, which is where Croydon’s historic fairs were held for centuries. The fairs traditionally held there were brought to an end in the 1860s when work began to build Croydon Central Station, whose platforms were on the site of what is now Queen’s Gardens and the Town Hall. The station closed in 1890 because it was unprofitable, and after it was demolished a short section from the main line as far as Park Lane remained in use as Fairfield Yard. This engineer’s yard operated until the 1930s when it was bought by Croydon Council, who promoted a competition in 1935 to design a new Civic Centre for the future. Plans were delayed by the outbreak of war and resurrected in the mid-1950s.

After the completion of the Technical College in 1959, the priority for the redevelopment programme was entertainment and cultural facilities. The old Public Halls on the corner of George Street and Wellesley Road had been demolished in 1957, while on the High Street, the Davis Theatre and the Grand Theatre had both closed in 1959 and been replaced by Davis House and Grosvenor House office blocks.

To fulfil the need for a new cultural venue, Fairfield Halls was built between 1960 and 1962 by Robert Atkinson and Partners.  Using a very different style to their building of the Technical College, a large central concert hall with the auditorium at first-floor level was built between the smaller Ashcroft Theatre and the Arnhem Gallery.  The building’s appearance is very similar to a scaled-down version of London’s Royal Festival Hall, built a decade earlier.  Hope Bagenal was the acoustic consultant on both projects, and Fairfield Hall’s acoustics benefited greatly from what had been learnt on the Royal Festival Hall’s earlier build. Consequently, Fairfield Halls’ world-class 1,802-seat Concert Hall is famed for its acoustics, which are regarded as amongst the best in the UK, resulting in many classical recordings and rehearsals taking place in Croydon. 

Fairfield Halls was opened by Her Majesty the Queen Mother in November 1962. The inaugural performance in the concert hall was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Sir Malcolm Sergeant with soloist Yehudi Menuhin.  In the Ashcroft Theatre, Peggy Ashcroft delivered a monologue written especially by John Betjemin, followed by the play, Royal Gambit with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.

The following year, on the 25th of April 1963, the concert hall hosted two performances by a new band called the Beatles, as part of a Mersey Beat Tour just a month after their first album, Please Please Me was released.   A young man, Andy Wright, who was doing work experience at the halls, had a camera with him and captured some unique early images of the group on stage which were rediscovered nearly 50 years later.  

Control for the Fairfield Halls passed from the Council to a charitable trust in 1993. In 2016, the building closed for major refurbishment and re-opened in September 2019 managed by BH Live, a social interest company based in Bournemouth.  Many of the building’s 1960s features have been refurbished and remain to showcase the history of the building.