WHEN the Duke of Edinburgh is opening your new £2.75m county hall, you want flags to be flying from every conceivable part of the building.
And so, in the early 1960s, Durham’s brutalist County Hall was constructed with two rows of five pipes embedded in the wall over its main entrance.
Before the duke arrived, on October 14, 1963, Union flags on long poles were poked furled through the pipes so that, once outside, they unfurled to give His Highness a fine, fluttery welcome.
We are hugely grateful to Emma Newman in the county council’s communications department for persuading someone with a camera to venture into the uppermost reaches of the building, now shut off, to take pictures of the caps on the inside of the pipes (above). These caps must have been unscrewed so the flagpoles could be pushed through.
The poles must somehow have been secured to the inside wall, otherwise the duke might have come under attack in a way not seen since the English pioneered the use of longbows at the Battle of Agincourt in 1415, with the 10 long flagpoles raining down on him from a great height.
The history of County Hall is currently part of the archives which are being moved to the new Story site, as regular Memories readers know, so we can’t see if there is photographic evidence of the pipes being frequently used.
READ MORE: COUNTY HALL, THE BRUTALIST PEOPLE'S PALACE, IN HISTORIC PICTURES
But the North East Film Archive has a fabulous colour film of “Extracts from the Year of Office of the Right Worshipful Mayor of Durham” from 1963. He was Cllr Norman Richardson, accompanied by his wife, Peggy, and the visit of the duke was the highlight of their year.
The 25-minute long film shows the duke arriving in front of a huge grandstand which had been constructed on the grass – now a car park – outside County Hall. There are even people sitting on the roofs of the hall’s brutalist boxes trying to get a view.
And there are plenty of pictures of the flags flying in the October Durham sunshine...
...but the duke is never shown looking up to admire them.
Therefore, he doesn’t notice the raised brickwork which is directly beneath the flagpole pipes. In past weeks, we’ve conjectured that it was in the shape of a miner’s lamp or that it was a population graph representing the demographic make-up of the county.
However, it now seems that it was a plinth for an artwork that, in the end, was never commissioned.
Mayor Richardson and his wife, Peggy, wave the duke off
Despite these quirky features, in 2009, when Weardale Councillor John Shuttleworth approached English Heritage about getting County Hall listed, he was told that even by 1960s standards, it was “rather old fashioned”, lacked innovation and did not have enough involvement by "practitioners of national renown".
This seems a little harsh on the building, and its principal architect, Sir Basil Spence, of national renown as he designed Coventry Cathedral. He was assisted by the county architect, GR Clayton, who was responsible for the mock-Norman columns in the entrance which Prince Philip walked past.
Not everyone agrees with English Heritage’s downbeat assessment. An online blog called Modern Mooch, in which the writer walks passionately around very modern buildings, says: “There is no evidence of any will or pressure to save this glorious building,
“Go see it whilst you are still able.”
- We are very grateful to the North East Film Archive for the stills from the 1963 film. It is well worth watching. Go to yfanefa.com and put its number, 20509, in the search box, and it will come up. Are there any more secrets of County Hall that we should know about?
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