Merton Civic Centre

The main building was originally commissioned on a speculative basis by a developer, Bernard Sunley & Sons, for use as commercial offices and for postal sorting.[1][2] The site selected had previously been occupied by a large post office and some other shops.[3] As part of the site redevelopment a public house known as "The Crown", on an adjacent site to the east, was demolished and subsequently replaced with a supermarket.[4]

The new building, which was designed by A. Green in the Modernist style, opened as "Crown House" in 1962.[5] The design involved a 15-storey curved structure with layers of continuous concrete panels above and below a continuous row of glass windows on each floor: the whole structure was 49.4 metres (162 ft) high.[5] Many of the council officers of the London Borough of Merton and their departments, which had previously been located at Wimbledon Town Hall, moved into the building in 1985.[6]

After civic leaders decided to co-locate all their operations at Morden, and to use it as their meeting place as well, the adjacent site to the east which had previously been occupied by a supermarket was acquired for expansion.[7] This expansion was implemented by the construction of a new three-storey block in front of the main structure: the design for the extension was more angular than the curved structure behind and involved a symmetrical frontage of seven bays facing onto the junction of Crown Lane and London Road; it featured a portico with a canopy on the ground floor and a tall oriel window stretching up from the first floor to second floor.[8] This extension contained a council chamber and a public library enabling the expanded complex to become the new Civic Centre for Merton in 1990.[1] A major programme of refurbishment works to replace all the windows in the main structure with aluminium double-glazing was completed in spring 2014.[9]

The Merton Heritage & Local Studies Centre, which was established to exhibit aspects of the history and culture of the area, moved onto the first floor of the new library area in 2009.[10][11] In 2015 the Merton Heritage & Local Studies Centre hosted a series of "War Story Days" to meet with residents and record their experiences from the First World War for a new project entitled "Carved in Stone", material from which was published on the centre's website.[12] This was followed up with a "Heritage Discovery Day" in May 2017.[13]