County Hall, Durham

In the first half of the 20th century Durham County Council was based at the Shire Hall in Old Elvet, Durham.[1] After deciding the Shire Hall was inadequate for their needs, county leaders chose to procure a new county headquarters: the site selected had previously been open land[2] forming part of the Aykley Heads Estate which centred around an 18th century mansion that had been built and occupied by the Dixon-Johnson family.[3][4][5]

Work on the new building began in 1960: it was designed by Sir Basil Spence in the Brutalist style,[6] was built by John Laing & Son[7] at a cost of £2.75 million and was officially opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 14 October 1963.[8] The design for the seven-storey building involved continuous bands of glazing with exposed concrete beams above and below: a large mosaic mural depicting local scenes was designed by Clayton and Gelson and installed on the face of the building.[9] Internally, the principal room was the council chamber; a memorial to county council staff who had died in the First and Second World Wars was recovered from the Shire Hall and installed outside the new council chamber.[10]

Works of art in the building included a painting, 30.75 feet (9.37 m) long and 5.66 feet (1.73 m) high, by Norman Cornish, depicting a miners' gala, which was located in the entrance hall. In March 2020, it was relocated to Bishop Auckland Town Hall.[11]

In March 2019, the County Council approved a proposal to move to a smaller new-build facility on the Sands car park at Freeman's Place in the centre of Durham.[12] Of around 1,850 staff currently based in County Hall, 1,000 will be based at the new HQ and approximately 850 will relocate to four council office sites being developed across the county in Crook, Meadowfield, Seaham and Spennymoor.[13] The building works, carried out by Kier Group at a cost of £50 million, were completed in March 2022.[14][15][16] Richard Holden, Conservative member of parliament for North-West Durham, described the new council headquarters as a 'vanity project', questioning the suitability of the location as well as tax increases and cuts to services used to pay for the development.[17] With the Labour council leadership that ordered the new building having been replaced by a Conservative-led coalition after the 2021 local elections, the decision was made to sell the new building to Durham University for £84 million as a new home for Durham University Business School and instead to build a new civic centre on the existing site in Aykley Heads. The sale was condemned by the opposition Labour group in the County Council.[18] In 2023, it was announced that plans to build a new civic centre on the current site would not go ahead and that the council now planned to buy the nearby Rivergreen building and redevelop it as a new council HQ from 2025.[19] Under the new plans, the current County Hall would still be demolished and the site redeveloped as part of an innovation district.[20]

The county council also announced plans in 2019 to move the county archives from County Hall to a new history centre at Mount Oswald.[21] Once the moves have taken place, the Council plans to demolish County Hall as part of a masterplan for Aykley Heads to redevelop the wider site as a business park with supporting retail, financial and professional, food and drink, non-residential institutions, and assembly and leisure uses with associated landscaping, multi-storey and surface car parking.[22]