THEY thought, designed and built big in those days. No half measures, no cutting corners, no plasterers or painters from hell as seen in modern television programmes.

County Hall at Northallerton is a great elegant Edwardian lump of a building, ironically facing a main line railway station, where earlier Victorian architecture was allowed by its owner to become so scandalously decrepit that it had to be demolished and replaced with modern objects possessing all the grace and charm of garden sheds.

No such fate was allowed to befall the administrative headquarters of North Yorkshire County Council where, because the main frontage buildings are listed for their architectural and historical importance, they remain more or less as they appeared to our forefathers a century ago.

Maintenance is another matter, for it can sometimes resemble painting the Forth Bridge. No sooner have they finished one bit than it appears they have to start all over again somewhere else.

John Grundy, the television architectural expert who elevated some buildings to greatness and crushed others under the merciless boot of history, does not seem to have visited County Hall for his programme Grundy's Wonders.

If he had, perhaps he would have waxed lyrical about the red brick with stone dressings, the formal gardens, the entrance hall with arched bays, black and white marble floor and 1907 clock, the grand staircase leading to meeting rooms with fluted Corinthian columns, carved cornices, elaborately decorated ceilings, floors of English oak and joinery in Cuban mahogany.

In earlier times, sensitive ladies might have averted their gaze from the main feature of the staircase, a nude statue of Samson killing the Philistine with the jawbone of an ass, a copy of a masterpiece presented to the county by Sir William Worsley in 1906.

It was perhaps ironic that celebrations in 2003 to mark the centenary of the laying of the County Hall foundation stone coincided with what was supposed to be a great debate about a Yorkshire regional assembly and the future of local government.

For everywhere you go in the heart of County Hall - the democratic nerve centre where members decide how much you will pay in council tax - you will find paintings and photographs of stern-looking men with beards who administered the old North Riding until those seismic events of 1974 changed the face of the map.

One visitor to a County Hall committee meeting in 2003 was so struck by the grandeur of the place that he thought it must be a converted country house.

He was soon disabused by those who knew better, for County Hall was completed in 1906 at a cost of about £40,000, including the land, to a design by the York architect Walter Brierley.

The present formal square of buildings was created by the addition of three new wings, all in the style of the original Brierley design, between 1914 and 1940.

Between 1940 and 1975 more buildings were added, tucked away at the back or the side, but they are the poor relations. Each is more representative of its time, when money was tighter and architects were less imaginative.

Northallerton had become the administrative centre of the North Riding in 1890 and County Hall brought together staff who had previously worked in offices scattered across the town.

The work of the county council was expected to grow as its chairman, John Hutton, MP, laid the foundation stone of the new headquarters. A contemporary report quoted Ald Hugh Bell: "If fault there was, it would be not that the buildings were too large, but that they were not sufficiently pretentious and palatial for the purposes for which they were intended."

A curiously pompous statement, and history does not record the reaction among ratepayers who were supposed to know their place but who then had no automatic right of admittance to council meetings so that they could see what so much money had been spent on.

Another comment was rather more thoughtful: "The whole strikes a happy medium between elaborateness and the false economy that is akin to jerrybuilding."

Walter Brierley's legacy is now administered at County Hall by such as architectural practice manager Malcolm Brown, who joined the county council in 1972.

Mr Brown said: "It was a very prestigious building for the days when it was built. It is ornate by modern standards, but nothing like Castle Howard."

It falls to people like Mr Brown to ensure that the fabric of the building is maintained to a standard befitting its official status, grade II*. Even modern aids for the disabled, such as the new entrance ramp and a lift, had to go through the proper channels.

External decoration is done every five years and, according to Mr Brown, it will not be long before some of the stonework needs attention, although the slate roofs have lasted well. Sliding sash windows cause problems because it is difficult to soundproof them to modern standards.

Mr Brown said: "We will be all right with stonemasons and some roofers, and OK with decorators, but we would certainly have problems if we had to replace plasterwork. If we had to replace marble floors we probably wouldn't do it in that way again, unless the listing forced us to do so."

Like York Minster or Durham Cathedral, County Hall is the kind of building which no one would attempt to replicate today, because it would cost too much, so many skills have been lost and some of the raw materials involved would conflict with the whole idea of protecting the world's forests.

One tiny detail goes generally unremarked in the grand scheme of things. Mr Brown revealed that much of the furniture in the committee rooms was made by "Mousey" Thompson, of Kilburn, near Thirsk.