In last year’s journal Gill Cordingley described the background to the building of Shire Hall in Hertford in 1768-73. The project was handled by a Committee of JPs, who appointed the firm of Robert and James Adam to design the building. The Adam brothers were renowned for the way in which they embellished their neo-classical buildings with fine stucco and ornamental features, and they no doubt assumed that Shire Hall too would receive this treatment. The Committee, however, wanted to keep costs to a minimum and they stipulated that the building was to be of “a plain and neat manner divested of superfluous ornament.” Shire Hall thus came to be little more than a brick box.
Over the following 200 years the building came to look very drab, and in August 1929 the County Council was presented with a scheme to improve its appearance by giving it a facing of “reconstructed Portland stone”. The scheme was the brainchild of an architect named E.C. Washington Evans, and to give his ideas additional weight, he built a very fine model of what a revamped Shire Hall would look like. The scheme was apparently well received, but it never really stood a chance of becoming reality, what with the prevailing economic climate and its estimated cost of £10,000. The model, however, survived and was given to Hertford Museum where it now resides in the Museum Stores.
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