Was Durham's Millburngate House the ugliest building in the city?

Milburngate House – once described as “the biggest blot on Durham’s landscape” – is the product of an earlier age of levelling up when civil servants’ jobs were moved out of London to the regions.

Just as Darlington is today’s recipient of 1,500 jobs connected to the Treasury, so in the early 1960s, Durham was the recipient of nearly 2,000 posts in the Post Office Savings Certificate Division.

The announcement in 1962 that they were to move from an Edwardian office block in Manor Park, London, was welcomed by the city’s Labour MP Charles Grey who had been campaigning for civil service to come to the county to give it an economic boost.

However, by March 1963, only about 350 of the 2,000 London staff had volunteered to relocate and the number which eventually went through and made the move north was much smaller.

The Post Office Savings Bank on the riverside in the centre of Durham taking shape in June 1967

Remarkably, in those days, government departments did not have to get planning permission for their new buildings and so designs for their office block in Milburngate – which replaced two ugly gasometers – were not made public until the building began to take shape.

As the brutalist shapes emerged on the banks of the Wear, the City of Durham Trust described them as a "sore thumb" and a "thorough disappointment". The trust was not against concrete constructions as it had hailed Dunelm House, the new home of the students’ union, as a good example of a modern building, but the boxes of the Post Office Savings Bank were beyond the bounds of acceptability.

The Post Office Savings Bank being built in October 1969 beside the new A690 Framwellgate road

Workers moved into the first section of Milburngate House on the waterside in January 1967, and by the time of its opening by Princess Alexandra in March 1970, about 1,300 people worked there – nearly all of them recruited locally.

The arrival of the jobs did not put an end to the architectural controversy. In the late 1980s, architectural historian Alec Clifton Taylor described Milburngate House as "an assertive lump of hideous concrete that could only have been put up by a government department exempt, as it should certainly not be, from obtaining planning permission”.

He concluded: “It is a disgrace".

In terms of Durham’s history, where buildings stand for many centuries, Milburngate House was just a blip that was erased in the blink of an eye. In 2018, it was demolished 48 years after its official opening, and now a £150m development of a hotel, offices and apartments is taking shape on its site. How long will that last, do you think?

Demolition of Milburngate House started just before the pandemic hit

Alan Rose writes to take us to task for regularly referring to Milburngate House as the “Post Office Savings Bank”.

“Although local people often referred to it by that name, it was never correct,” he says.

“I worked there for more than 20 years. Milburngate House was originally known as Saving Certificate and Save As You Earn Office (SCSO). It was part of the Department for National Saving (DNS), now National Savings and Investments (NS&I).

“There were two other product divisions – the Post Office Savings or National Savings Bank was in Glasgow, and the Bonds and Stocks Office which was in Blackpool. It administered Premium Bonds along with less well-known products, and housed ERNIE, the computer that selected the winning bond.

Ernest Marples, the Postmaster-General, pressing a button to start up ERNIE (the Electronic Random Number Indicating Equipment) for the first Premium Savings Bonds draw, at Lytham St Annes, Lancashire, on June 1, 1957

“The Glasgow office was the first to start computerising. A number of Scots then emigrated from Glasgow to Durham to help with SCSO computerisation. There was a competition to name the first mainframe computer and the name chosen was “SCOT1” standing, if I remember correctly, for “Savings Certificate Office Technology”!

“When I joined in the late 1980s, about 1,500 people worked in Milburngate House and it was one of the largest employers in Durham.

The view from outside the new office on the riverside, looking to the new Milburngate Bridge in the late 1960s

“There were hundreds of filing cabinets holding paper records, some going back as far as 1917. As these old records were transferred to microfilm and business processes were automated, this number fell considerably and the work is now carried out in a much smaller building on the opposite bank of the river.

“I and my colleagues were originally civil servants, but the work was later outsourced to Siemens Business Services and later still transferred to Atos Origin.

“A branch of the Passport Office was set up in Milburngate House and after that the building was often referred to as the Passport Office.

“Milburngate House, of course, has been demolished and replaced by new developments. The building was hardly beautiful but I still prefer the old building to its replacements. Of course, nostalgia isn’t what it used to be!”

Perhaps Alan’s time in Milburngate House has given him slightly rose tinted spectacles when he was looking at the beauty of this blot…

Looking at Framwellgate and St Godric's church from the Milburngate bridge in July 1974 as the shopping centre takes shape