Central Offices, Barnsley

The building, which was designed in the brutalist style, was built with a reinforced concrete frame for Norwich Union on a vacant site just south of the old outdoor markets in the 1960s. The building was built in two phases: phase 1 was completed by 1973 and phase 2 by 1974. The design for the seven-storey building involved continuous bands of glazing with exposed concrete beams above and below: it was leased by South Yorkshire County Council from its formation in 1974 and was subsequently known as County Hall. During the Cold War era, South Yorkshire County Council declared itself "a nuclear-free zone", although in practice any emergency planning for a nuclear attack would have been linked…