County Hall is a high-rise tower block in Walton Street in

Aylesbury Aylesbury ( ) is the county town of Buckinghamshire, South East England. It is home to the Roald Dahl Children's Gallery, David Tugwell`s house on Watermead and the Waterside Theatre. It is in central Buckinghamshire, midway between High Wy ...

, in the county of

Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire (), abbreviated Bucks, is a ceremonial county in South East England that borders Greater London to the south-east, Berkshire to the south, Oxfordshire to the west, Northamptonshire to the north, Bedfordshire to the north-ea ...

in England. It was built to house the former

Buckinghamshire County Council Buckinghamshire County Council was the upper-tier local authority for the administrative county and later the non-metropolitan county of Buckinghamshire, in England, the United Kingdom established in 1889 following the Local Government Act 1888 ...

. Following local government reorganisation in 2020 the building is now owned by

Buckinghamshire Council Buckinghamshire Council is a Unitary authorities of England, unitary Local Government in England, local authority in England, the area of which constitutes most of the ceremonial county of Buckinghamshire. It was created in April 2020 from the ar ...

. County Hall continues to be used as offices by the new council, but meetings of the council are held at The Gatehouse in Aylesbury, the former offices of

Aylesbury Vale The Aylesbury Vale (or Vale of Aylesbury) is a geographical region in Buckinghamshire, England, which is bounded by the Borough of Milton Keynes and South Northamptonshire to the north, Central Bedfordshire and the Borough of Dacorum ( Hertfor ...

District Council.

History

The original County Hall in Aylesbury was an 18th-century building in Market Square. In 1929 a building called "County Offices" was erected on Walton Street in Aylesbury, which served as the council's main offices in conjunction with the nearby County Hall. After deciding that the old County Hall and County Offices were inadequate for their needs, county leaders chose to procure a new county headquarters: the site selected was directly opposite the County Offices on Walton Street, and had previously been occupied by a residential property known as "Willowbank" and later as "the Old House". The foundation stone of the new concrete and glass County Hall was laid by the

Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire There has been a Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire almost continuously since the position was created by King Henry VIII in 1535. The only exception to this was the English Civil War and English Interregnum between 1643 and 1660 when there was no ...

, Sir Henry Floyd, on 22 October 1964. The block was designed by county architect

Fred Pooley Fred Bernard Pooley CBE (18 April 1916 – 11 March 1998) is best known as the county architect of Buckinghamshire, and his futuristic monorail proposals for a new town in north Bucks that eventually became Milton Keynes. Pooley was born in We ...

and completed in 1966. The design involved a tower which stood high and consisted of 15 floors sitting above a complex containing the County

Reference Library A library is a collection of Document, materials, books or media that are accessible for use and not just for display purposes. A library provides physical (hard copies) or electronic media, digital access (soft copies) materials, and may be a ...

, Aylesbury

Register Office A register office or The General Register Office, much more commonly but erroneously registry office (except in official use), is a British government office where births, deaths, marriages, civil partnership, stillbirths and adoptions in England, ...

and the County Record Office. The county council continued to use the 1929 County Offices (or "Old County Offices") building as secondary office space, with the new County Hall sometimes being called "New County Offices" to distinguish it from the 1929 building. Full council meetings were not generally held at New County Hall, but continued to be held at Old County Hall in Market Square until 2012, when they transferred to Aylesbury Vale District Council's new council chamber (called the Oculus) at The Gateway on Gatehouse Road, Aylesbury. The new County Hall was visible from many villages and towns several miles distant. Dominating a predominantly low-rise 18th-century town, it proved to be a conversational piece of architecture. Often referred to locally as "Pooley's Folly" or "Fred's Fort" (after the architect) the building took just two years to build and was completed at a cost of £956,000 in 1966. Analytically, if not architecturally, the new County Hall is in keeping with the town's architecture, its design history is as provincial as its more classical predecessors. While its design is a bold conception freely using works by such architects as

Frank Lloyd Wright Frank Lloyd Wright (June 8, 1867 – April 9, 1959) was an American architect, designer, writer, and educator. He designed more than 1,000 structures over a creative period of 70 years. Wright played a key role in the architectural movements o ...

Le Corbusier Charles-Édouard Jeanneret (6 October 188727 August 1965), known as Le Corbusier ( , , ), was a Swiss-French architect, designer, painter, urban planner, writer, and one of the pioneers of what is now regarded as modern architecture. He was ...

and the characteristics of

De Stijl ''De Stijl'' (; ), Dutch for "The Style", also known as Neoplasticism, was a Dutch art movement founded in 1917 in Leiden. De Stijl consisted of artists and architects. In a more narrow sense, the term ''De Stijl'' is used to refer to a body o ...

and it has similarities to Paul Rudolph's School of Art and Architecture at

Yale Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wor ...

completed in 1963. However, as early as 1904

Auguste Perret Auguste Perret (12 February 1874 – 25 February 1954) was a French architect and a pioneer of the architectural use of reinforced concrete. His major works include the Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, the first Art Deco building in Paris; the C ...

designed a block of flats in the Rue Franklin, Paris which has similar angles, bayed windows and canted recesses to County Hall in Aylesbury, and these flats too were constructed of concrete. With its Brutalist roots in the 1940s, and earlier, Aylesbury's County Hall was, like its classical predecessor, already dated by the time of its 1966 completion: by then architecture was moving on to the cleaner and straighter lines and sheets of plate glass advocated by such architects as

Mies van der Rohe Ludwig Mies van der Rohe ( ; ; born Maria Ludwig Michael Mies; March 27, 1886August 17, 1969) was a German-American architect. He was commonly referred to as Mies, his surname. Along with Alvar Aalto, Le Corbusier, Walter Gropius and Frank Lloyd ...

. Works of art in County Hall include a portrait by

Godfrey Kneller Sir Godfrey Kneller, 1st Baronet (born Gottfried Kniller; 8 August 1646 – 19 October 1723), was the leading portrait painter in England during the late 17th and early 18th centuries, and was court painter to Kingdom of England, English and Br ...

John Egerton, 3rd Earl of Bridgewater John Egerton, 3rd Earl of Bridgewater KB PC (9 November 1646 – 19 March 1701) was a British nobleman from the Egerton family. He was the eldest son of John Egerton, 2nd Earl of Bridgewater and his wife Elizabeth Cavendish. His maternal gran ...

, a portrait by

Joshua Reynolds Sir Joshua Reynolds (16 July 1723 – 23 February 1792) was an English painter, specialising in portraits. John Russell said he was one of the major European painters of the 18th century. He promoted the "Grand Style" in painting which depend ...

George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham George may refer to: People * George (given name) * George (surname) * George (singer), American-Canadian singer George Nozuka, known by the mononym George * George Washington, First President of the United States * George W. Bush, 43rd President ...

and a painting by

Peter Paul Rubens Sir Peter Paul Rubens (; ; 28 June 1577 – 30 May 1640) was a Flemish artist and diplomat from the Duchy of Brabant in the Southern Netherlands (modern-day Belgium). He is considered the most influential artist of the Flemish Baroque traditio ...

depicting a hunting party being attacked by wolves. When Buckinghamshire County Council and the constituent districts merged to become a unitary authority in 2020, consideration was given to where the new council should be based. One option considered was the creation of a council chamber within New County Hall. It was decided instead that the Aylesbury Vale District Council building at The Gateway, with its relatively new council chamber, should be the new council's headquarters, with New County Hall continuing to be used as additional office space.

References

{{Reflist Buildings and structures in Buckinghamshire Buckinghamshire County Council Aylesbury A Government buildings completed in 1966