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May-Sept daily 10am-5pm; Oct-April Mon-Sat 10am-5pm; free; www.corpoflondon.gov.uk. Tube: St Paul's or Bank. Situated at the geographical centre of the City, Guildhall has been the ancient seat of the City administration for over eight hundred years. It remains the headquarters of the Corporation of London, and is still used for many of the City's formal civic occasions. Architecturally, however, it is not quite the beauty it once was, having been badly damaged in both the Great Fire and the Blitz, and scarred by the addition of a grotesque 1970s concrete cloister and wing. Nonetheless, the Great Hall , basically a postwar reconstruction of the fifteenth-century original, is worth a brief look, as is the Guildhall Clock Museum (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-4pm; free), a collection of over six hundred timepieces, including one of the clocks that won John Harrison the Longitude prize. Also worth a visit is the new, purpose-built Guildhall Art Gallery (Mon-Sat 10am-5pm, Sun noon-5pm; GBP2.50), which contains one or two exceptional works, such as Rossetti's La Ghirlandata, and Holman Hunt's The Eve of St Agnes, plus a massive painting depicting the 1782 Siege of Gibraltar, commissioned by the Corporation.
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