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Life on the barge



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TODAY'S online calendar picture is a wonderful snapshot of life on the barge at Aylesbury's canal basin.
Thanks to Sharon Elmidoro for this picture, which shows the Bucks County Council office dominating the skyline in the backdrop.

Around 1929 the county architect C. Riley was commissioned to design a large office block for Buckinghamshire County Council. The County Offices (later known as County Hall) was a three storey building of 17 bays in an almost Second Empire design. The flat facade has a slight projection of the terminating bays, and a low stone portico at the centre. On the first floor the centre window, and the windows at the centre of the terminating bays were given pediments. Otherwise the facade beneath a mansard roof is unadorned.

In the mid 1960s a large part of the town centre was redeveloped by Frederick B. Pooley, the county architect, providing a new shopping centre, bus station, and County Hall. Pooley was experienced in the design of schools having drawn the plans for three educational establishments in the town: Quarrendon County Secondary School in 1959, Grange Secondary Modern School in 1954, and Oak Green Primary School in 1950. Pooley's choice of architecture was Brutalist, an architectural style sometimes referred to as "the celebration of concrete" - its chief building component, the first example of this style in the town. The new town centre was tiered, with an underground bus station and market, an open ground level pedestrian square around which were larger shops and a cafeteria built high on stilts, and above, a three floored department store. While this form of town planning is often scorned today, at the time it provided exactly what was required by its consumers, greater shopping choices with easy access and convenient public transport all in a modern environment contrasting with the war time building restrictions which had lingered, in Britain, until the previous decade.

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  • Last Updated: 30 April 2008 9:14 AM
  • Source: n/a
  • Location: Aylesbury
 
 
  

 
 

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