County Hall, Aylesbury

County Hall is a high-rise tower block in Walton Street in Aylesbury, in the county of Buckinghamshire in England. It was built to house the former Buckinghamshire County Council, and it remains the main office and the meeting place of Buckinghamshire Council. The block was designed by county architect Fred Pooley and completed in 1966.

County Hall, Aylesbury
The facade of County Hall
County Hall
Location within Buckinghamshire
General information
Architectural styleBrutalist style
AddressAylesbury
CountryUnited Kingdom
Coordinates51.81461°N 0.81206°W / 51.81461; -0.81206
Completed1966
Design and construction
ArchitectFred Pooley

History

The original County Hall in Aylesbury was an 18th-century building in Market Square.[1] After deciding the old county hall was inadequate for their needs, county leaders chose to procure a new county headquarters: the site selected had previously been occupied by a residential property known as "Willowbank" and later as "the Old House".[2][3]

The foundation stone of the new concrete and glass County Hall was laid by the Lord Lieutenant of Buckinghamshire, Sir Henry Floyd, on 22 October 1964. The design involved a tower which stood 200 ft. (61m) high and consisted of 15 floors sitting above a complex containing the County Reference Library, Aylesbury Register Office and the County Record Office. Inside it brought together for the first time all the departments and machinations of Buckinghamshire County Council. The building 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.[4] Often referred to locally as "Pooley's Folly" or "Fred's Fort" (after the architect Fred Pooley) the building took just two years to build and was completed at a cost of £956,000 in 1966.[5][6]

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, Le Corbusier and De Stijl and it has similarities to Paul Rudolph's School of Art and Architecture at Yale completed in 1963. However, as early as 1904 Auguste Perret designed a block of flats in the Rue Franklin, Paris which has similar angles, bayed windows and canted recesses to County Hall in Aylesbury,[7] 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.[8]

Works of art in County Hall include a portrait by Godfrey Kneller of John Egerton, 3rd Earl of Bridgewater,[9] a portrait by Joshua Reynolds of George Nugent-Temple-Grenville, 1st Marquess of Buckingham[10] and a painting by Peter Paul Rubens depicting a hunting party being attacked by wolves.[11]

References
  1. "Historic Aylesbury Crown Court closes its doors for last time". Buckinghamshire County Council. Retrieved 14 August 2019.
  2. "Ordnance Survey Map". 1925. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  3. "The Old House, formerly known as Willowbank, opposite the junction of Exchange Street". Historic England. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  4. The Times 1 April 1998 p21
  5. "Take a look at Aylesbury's historic architecture". Bucks Herald. 19 June 2014. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  6. "'Pooley's folley': County Hall still dividing opinion 50 years on". Bucks Herald. 4 November 2016. Retrieved 14 November 2020.
  7. "Image of Perret's flats in Paris". Retrieved 29 April 2018.
  8. "Mies van der Rohe". Museum of Modern Art. Retrieved 29 April 2018.
  9. Kneller, Godfrey. "John Egerton (1646–1701), 3rd Earl of Bridgewater". Art UK. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  10. Reynolds, Joshua. "George Grenville Nugent Temple (1753–1813), 1st Marquis of Buckingham". Art UK. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
  11. Rubens, Peter Paul. "A Hunting Party Attacked by Wolves". Art UK. Retrieved 3 October 2020.
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