Councillors in east London have flown in the face of advice from planning officers and rejected proposals to replace their current town hall with a scheme that includes two SimpsonHaugh-designed residential towers.

Tower Hamlets Council’s strategic development committee voted 5:2 to refuse the practice’s designs for a 36-storey student-housing block and a 30-storey build-to-rent block on the site of the borough’s Mulberry Place headquarters and a neighbouring office building in Blackwall.

Tower Hamlets is due to move out of its current town hall, which is leased, and into a new base at the grade II-listed former Royal London Hospital building in Whitechapel, which has been converted to designs by AHMM.

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