Shire Hall is a former municipal building in Castle Hill in

Cambridge Cambridge ( ) is a List of cities in the United Kingdom, city and non-metropolitan district in the county of Cambridgeshire, England. It is the county town of Cambridgeshire and is located on the River Cam, north of London. As of the 2021 Unit ...

Cambridgeshire Cambridgeshire (abbreviated Cambs.) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in the East of England and East Anglia. It is bordered by Lincolnshire to the north, Norfolk to the north-east, Suffolk to the east, Essex and Hertfor ...

, England. It was the headquarters of

Cambridgeshire County Council Cambridgeshire County Council is the county council for non-metropolitan county of Cambridgeshire, England. The non-metropolitan county is smaller than the Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county, which additionally includes the City o ...

from 1932 until 2021, when the council moved to New Shire Hall at

Alconbury Weald Alconbury Weald is a new settlement in the civil parish of The Stukeleys, in the Huntingdonshire district, of the county of Cambridgeshire, England. The settlement lies to the north-west of the town of Huntingdon, and to the south of Peterborou ...

, some 23 miles from Cambridge.

History

An earlier shire hall was completed in the grounds of the old

Cambridge Castle Cambridge Castle, locally also known as Castle Mound, is located in Cambridge, Cambridgeshire, England. Originally built after the Norman conquest of England, Norman conquest to control the strategically important route to the north of England, ...

on Castle Street in 1843, serving as the county's main courthouse. The building stood directly on the Castle Street frontage, with a police station adjoining. Much of the remainder of the castle site to the rear was used for a prison. Meanwhile, County Hall in Hobson Street served as the meeting place of

. After deciding that the Hobson Street building was too small, county leaders chose to procure a new building; the site they selected was the former prison site behind the existing shire hall courthouse. The bricks from the old prison were recycled for construction of the new shire hall but the police station was retained and converted for additional office use. The new building, which was designed by Herbert Henry Dunn in the Neo-Georgian style, was completed in 1932, with the council's first meeting in the building being held on 23 July 1932. The design involved a symmetrical main frontage with fifteen bays facing south towards the Castle Hill mound; the central bay featured a doorway flanked with

pilaster In architecture, a pilaster is both a load-bearing section of thickened wall or column integrated into a wall, and a purely decorative element in classical architecture which gives the appearance of a supporting column and articulates an ext ...

s on the ground floor; there was a stone balcony and a window with a

fanlight A fanlight is a form of lunette window (transom window), often semicircular or semi-elliptical in shape, with glazing (window), glazing bars or tracery sets radiating out like an open Hand fan, fan. It is placed over another window or a doorway, ...

on the first floor. Internally, the principal room was the council chamber in the centre of the building on the first floor. The building was set back from Castle Street, standing behind the 1843 courthouse. The 1843 building was demolished in the early 1950s and its site incorporated into the gardens in front of the new shire hall. An office building known as "The Octagon", because of its shape, was added to the north of the main building in the 1960s and a bunker for use as an emergency planning centre in the event of a nuclear attack was completed in 1989. In December 2017, as part of a cost-saving scheme, the county council announced plans to move to a smaller purpose-built facility at

; the proposal was approved by the full county council in May 2018. In May 2019 the county council announced that it would give the developer, Brookgate, a lease of up to 40 years to develop the site for hotel and office accommodation: the terms of the lease would require the developer to provide continued public access to the Castle Mound. The costs of moving the data centre were subsequently estimated at nearly £7 million. Construction work on the New Shire Hall at Alconbury Weald started in December 2019. The final committee meeting to be held at Shire Hall was on 12 March 2020. Meetings were then held online due to the

COVID-19 pandemic The COVID-19 pandemic (also known as the coronavirus pandemic and COVID pandemic), caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2), began with an disease outbreak, outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan, China, in December ...

for the rest of 2020 and first part of 2021, during which time the council vacated Shire Hall and moved to New Shire Hall, with the first committee meeting at New Shire Hall being held in September 2021.

References

{{reflist Buildings and structures in Cambridge C Government buildings completed in 1932