Description: The story of how Nottingham's Council House came to be designed by the City's housing architect of the day, T. Cecil Howitt (1889-1968) has often been recounted. Howitt had been working since the summer of 1922, through reasons of economy, from within the City Engineer's Department, preparing designs for a new generation of council houses, yet was asked to develop ideas for a civic building eventually costing around £500,000. In the autumn of 1923 Alderman Herbert Bowles, Chairman of the Council's Estates Committee wandered into the housing department after hours and found Cecil Howitt working away ' without any prospect of 'overtime'. The two men chatted and smoked together and at some point Bowles put a proposition before Howitt: 'How would it appeal to you to put on paper a scheme for a new Exchange?' Howitt replied 'Give me a chance.' Howitt later said that although the Estates Committee had allowed him three months to produce his designs, he had in fact been thinking about the site for some twenty years. This is an intriguing comment for it was almost twenty years earlier, in 1904, that Howitt entered the office of the architect Albert Nelson Bromley, the year that Bromley was engaged in supervising the erection of the former Boots flagship store on High Street to his design, the new store being to the rear of the old Exchange building. No doubt prompted by Bowles initial specific brief, Howitt produced what was essentially a rather magnificent shopping arcade, largely influenced by the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II in Milan. The story of the chance meeting of Alderman Bowles and Cecil Howitt after hours was that recounted by Bowles at the dinner celebrating the opening of the Council House on 22 May 1929. (information fromwww.nottinghamcivicsociety.org.uk)