Civic Centre

The Civic Centre at Chester Le Street must be one of the strangest buildings that I have ever been in.  It is an edifice of glass and steel and aluminium with its service pipes on show, arteries and veins that carry heat and power in a Pompidou style.  It is a post-modern construction somewhere between a leisure centre and a shopping mall and an Airstream caravan, part Brittas Empire, part Wilko’s and part kitsch only there are no leisure facilities and no shelves of wares for sale and no one in socks and sandals, well not many. 

You can enter the building by the front door from the east off Newcastle Road or from the west through the staff car park.  The central atrium has a curved roof and runs down hill from front to back like the nave of a futuristic cathedral from UFO and as you walk across the rubber floor to the reception desk you expect to see Commander Ed Straker pass by and be met by girls in silver suits and with purple bobbed hair.  But you aren’t, the receptionist are people like the rest of us, presentable in their apparently anachronistic blue uniforms, the future turned out not to be futuristic at all.  From the outside it leans back like an old barn where the uprights have failed and the only thing that holds up the roof is the pile of rotting bales at one end.

To either side of the central walkway is an array of metal offices with walls peppered with portholes adding to the overall effect of strangeness.  People sit at dilapidated desks with yellow storage units and power cables stretched across the green carpeted floor, green like a cricket pitch or a bowling green and as flat as a billiard table.  In one of the rooms is a canteen or restaurant that is open to all but which is never full.  Food and drink is despatched from a corridor hidden behind the east wall which gives way to a galley style kitchen as if it was on a cruise liner or a DFDS ferry to Amsterdam or a roll on roll off to Zeebrugge.

Upstairs is the chamber of the former district council again with steel and aluminium walls but with curved desks laid out like a senate.  It is a great room for a meeting, nice and big and airy but there is only one electric point and the acoustics are horrible.  No one can hear a speaker more then three metres away and everyone is too embarrassed to use the microphones that are on the desks.  At the back of the room the wall is glass and looks out over the top of the meeting rooms below.  For some reason the green carpet extends over the roof of the once busy registrar’s office and customer contact centre but as well as the carpet there is an arrangement of pebbles and variegated plants, mother in laws tongue I think.  From the chamber you can look out onto a Zen garden, an oasis in metallic desert, a small piece of calm in the otherwise hurly burly world of local politics.

The Civic Centre is a very peculiar place, award winning when it was opened but now trapped in an age of optimism and a vision of the future the likes of which we will probably never see again.