The original Shire Hall for Hertfordshire was located in Fore Street in Hertford.[2] After deciding that Shire Hall was too restricted for future expansion, county leaders chose to procure a new county headquarters: the site they selected was open land located just off Pegs Lane.[3]
Construction of the new building began in spring 1937.[4] It was designed by Charles Holloway James and Stephen Rowland Pierce in the Neo-Georgian style with Scandinavian elements,[5] built by C. Miskin & Son of St Albans and opened without ceremony in summer 1939.[4] The first full council meeting in the building was held on 6 November 1939, when Queen Elizabeth sent a message of regret that the outbreak of the Second World War had prevented her fulfilling an earlier promise to formally open the building.[6]
The design for the building involved an asymmetrical main frontage facing the Bullocks Lane; the left section of three bays featured a portico with four full height piers supporting a frieze with the words "Tertium iam annum regnante Georgio VI haec curia aedificata est" ("This building was constructed during the third year of the reign of George VI"); the portico contained a doorway flanked by square windows on the ground floor and it contained tall sash windows in a recess on the first floor; there was a copper-clad cupola at roof level; the right section contained a loggia of eleven bays on the ground floor and seven sash windows on the first floor.[1] The principal room was the council chamber which was contained in a curved structure which jutted out of the main building to the west.[7]
The Hertfordshire Local Defence Volunteers was formed at County Hall, to provide a secondary line of defence in case of invasion by the forces of Nazi Germany and other Axis powers during the Second World War, in 1940.[8] The Hertfordshire Film Archive was established at the building in 1978.[9] Sculptures of two deer designed by Stephen Elson were erected outside County Hall, to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of the building, in 1989.[10]
As of June 2025, the Hertfordshire County Council is pursuing plans to sell-off the site for around £50 million, a result of the moving of county hall staff to Stevenage offices in 2023.[13]
Other scenes filmed there were from the television thriller Prime Target in June 2023, from the crime series The Undertow in autumn 2023, and from the dystopian series Silo in October 2024, as well as from the crime series Grantchester and Code of Silence in October 2024 and November 2024 respectively.[16][17]
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