Biography | Philip Dalton Hepworth — The Competition He Won for This Building in 1932

Historic England's entry for this building opens: "Civic Centre. 1937-42 by P D Hepworth."

It goes on about Portland stone, a copper lantern, three storeys, nineteen bays with the end bays set forward. Grade II, listed on 9 March 1982.

Walthamstow proposed the competition in 1929. McGill University's record of his drawings says Hepworth won it in 1932.

He had studied at the Architectural Association Schools from 1906 to 1910 and at the École des Beaux-Arts in Paris, qualified as an architect in 1911, and took the Ashpitel Prize that year.

In 1914 he went to the British School at Rome on a Rome Scholarship. The First World War made him a lieutenant in the Royal Engineers.

The civic centre was built between 1937 and 1942, which is to say it was finished in the middle of the next war.

In 1944 the Imperial War Graves Commission appointed him Principal Architect for North-West Europe.

The Commission's own account of its architects says he designed forty-six cemeteries for it, and the memorials to the missing at Bayeux and Dunkirk.

One of the forty-six was Dieppe Canadian War Cemetery, which the Commission calls "the first new cemetery of the 1939-45 war to be completed in 1949."

His own dates are less settled than his buildings. The Biographical Dictionary of British and Irish Architects gives 12 March 1888, at Hampstead; the Dictionary of Scottish Architects gives 1890, citing the RIBA directory and his obituary in The Builder of 1 March 1963.

They agree on the death: London, 21 February 1963.

The building is still a town hall, under a different name — Waltham Forest, not Walthamstow. The square in front of it has been rebuilt with a fountain, and a granite slab in the paving carries a coat of arms and the words Fellowship Is Life.

Cover: the Portland stone front across the fountain square, nineteen bays with the end bays set forward and the copper lantern above the clock. Photograph by Matt From London, 20 September 2025, CC BY 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons. Second image: the granite slab in the paving, by the same photographer and licence.