For such an imposing landmark, it’s easy to lose it close up. From a distance, on the country roads around Aylesbury, there it stands, the lone imposing building on the skyline, roaring like a Godzilla-sized tardigrade, all lugs and heft. Once you’re in the town centre and its fiendish double roundabouts it vanishes among the shopping centres, the subterranean bus station, the buildings old and new. On foot you’re constantly having to look down to make sure you’re not about to sprain your ankle on some cobbles.
When I do see the tower of Buckinghamshire County Council (aka County Hall; Pooley’s Palace, after Fred Pooley, the post-war County Architect and designer of the building; or Pooley’s Folly; or the Tower of Power) it’s through street trees and between ornate old market square buildings like a shy giant, the many dark windows occasionally flashing with the sunlight. I get turned about in the sun, and find myself stranded on the edge, between a roundabout and a loading bay, doing the full JG Ballard, and unable to find the entrance. But I’ve not looped quite far enough, because here at last is the entrance in the tower’s podium building, a sunken recess of steep stairs lolling down like a hungry tongue. Suddenly I’m in the blandest magnolia reception, a noughties makeover worthy of Homes Under the Hammer, and in a queue with people eager to practice their stories of complex needs on the guy on reception, who just wants to usher them to a chair.
I’m here to meet Mel Walker, a designer and artist, who I’d first encountered at Real Magic Books in Wendover when I was doing a talk about Tales of the Suburbs. She was the only member of the audience clutching a copy of Concretopia, keen to talk brutalism in this village setting. She works as a graphic designer in the Tower of Power, she tells me. She’s recently taken to making screen prints and images of the tower, shocked that other people don’t love it. She shows me a print. Well I Like It is written across the bottom, part joke, part apology, part conformation. Later we’ll talk about how her love of 17th century Aylesbury happily coexists with her fondness for its most imposing twentieth century presence.
When she’d invited me to visit the tower, I’d eagerly accepted. She’s retiring soon, she says, so I need to get my skates on. So a couple of months later, at the height of a summer of heights, here I am, waiting in a reception as anonymous as the tower is exceptional. She arrives full of a story of coincidence: Aaron, her boss, has a walk on part in Tales of the Suburbs, as best pal of Beccy, one of my interviewees. For a social historian of modern places, it’s a small world.
We go and explore the tower, out onto a courtyard that reaches across the roof of the low-rise podium block. There’s a pigeon foot, tagged, on the ground, with no sign of the rest of the bird. Victim of the peregrine falcons nesting on the roof, Mel tells me. It’s like some kind of avian Blue Velvet. The tower’s design has a touch of Marcel Breuer to it, the sculptural repetition of the projecting bays of windows, the concrete swagger. We head up in the lift: she recalls when the office was full, a hundred employees per floor, and how the two lifts would take forever to evacuate people in a fire drill. Since covid people only work here a couple of days a week.
We head up to the 11th floor, second from top. Most doors tell us to keep out, but one is labelled Heritage Open Day. In here on the table are displays of old photos of the tower under construction or newly opened in 1966. The rooms look stylishly furnished, with chunky leather and chrome furniture, long desks with fans and anglepoise lamps, filing cabinets and pigeon holes. Fashions have changed, but there’s no way that if the office was still furnished like that people would think it was a mess. You can almost smell the at-desk fags, the lunchtime pints, the Mary Quant perfume and the musk of leather seats in the sun. Mel is delighted. She didn’t know this exhibition was here, and we’d stumbled across it on a hunch. Through the dirty windows of today we can see the rooftops of Aylesbury and the yellow fields of parched earth beyond. It’s a spectacular view in two directions. On the ledge sit a pair of pigeons, either side of a frame, sheltering from the sun and the falcons, chatting away like neighbours over a fence, full of gossip.
Back in the lobby we climb a set of stairs to the very top, beside the tower’s modular lugs, presumably containing the machinery for the elevators. We can’t get through any doors, and the windows are mostly caked with dust here, though we can see remains of numerous pigeons beside the falcons’ favoured plucking post. We shouldn’t really be up here, but she’s about to leave her job, and I’m just some nosy bloke, so what’s the difference? But we feel awkward and head to the lift in case we’re on camera.
Back down to the mezzanine, to what may well have been beside the water gardens we’d seen in the pictures earlier, but is now a pair of corridors flanking a vast meeting room. Once outside we’re on a bridge that leads to the shopping centre next door, the tower’s brutal buddy. On one side we can see the tower’s craggy, egg-box exterior in the shade, its form reflected in the windows of the low block behind us. I run down a slope in the other direction, where the tower pouts and basks in the sun like some sixties new wave star, a rough diamond in a genteel world of merrie England and rural affairs.
I head home soon after, thinking of incredible views, the handsome bulk of the building, and its surprisingly intimate and tucked away spaces. I’m imagining a promenade performance of a Henry Fielding novel taking place over storeys of this rural tower, the backdrop the fields and rooftops of an ancient country town, its affairs and episodes easy to dramatise up there in those open floors and tight corners.
What is the future for the Tower of Power? No-one knows. It’s not listed, and you know what people are like about postwar buildings. These places frighten them for the different ways of living they suggest, and the ambition of an age we no longer feel directly connected to. Here in Aylesbury it’s a monument to Fred Pooley’s vision for a rural powerhouse, a counterpoint to the big cities. Here a skyscraper for the council is built to remind its employees of the scope of their power and responsibility: to ancient townscape, modern utilities and scattered settlements, places beyond all those fields and under all that sky. When you’re in the tower, there’s no hiding what Buckinghamshire looks like. But perhaps this is what makes people nervous. It’s gossip and fiefdoms that keep Aylesbury ticking over. Transparency and oversight are new toys, and hard to maintain through dirty windows . But this building is a punchy signet ring, a macho reminder of a different age, one full of optimism, confidence and stout.
Join the Heritage Open Days at the tower on the 12 or 19 September, more information here, with all of the other Aylesbury heritage sites listed too.
Mel Walker is just embarking on a print-making journey, but I know some of you will be really interested in what she does next. Her Instagram is @meldesign80
Hookland Fragments
If you’re a lover of anything from folk horror to Detectorists you’ll probably be aware of Hookland. David Southwell’s enduring project takes us through imagined English folklore and traditions, which freed of a sense of obligation feel more like our actual history than the ragged remains we have today. He’s now produced a book: Hookland Fragments, which collects and expands some of the strange reveries and observations he’s made over the years, the fragments adding up to a different way of looking at our past and our relationship to it. It’s beguiling and funny and utterly charming, but not in any of the twee ways that makes it sound. Like Hookland itself, it’s constantly inspiring. ‘Nothing in Hookland is made up,’ he writes, ‘just remembered differently’. You can follow Hookland on Bluesky or buy the book here.
Events
Yes, I know, I know. But there’s more!
Brutal(ism) Love and Hate at the Southbank Centre on 27 September, a panel event chaired by Samira Ahmed.
Then some Tales of the Suburbs events:
Ipswich Book Festival on 3rd October.
Birmingham Literature Festival on 8th October.
Off the Shelf, Sheffield on 11 October.
A panel event, Old Places, New Stories at Coast is Queer, Brighton on 18 October.
I’m also doing an Arvon Online Masterclass: Telling true-life tales on 20th October.
Be amazing if you could make any of these, and thank you to everyone who has supported any of the events I’ve done up till now, it’s been wonderful to meet people and share some of the stories.
For the love of monstrosities
Don’t miss the most recent episodes of Monstrosities Mon Amour: Mike Parker on his love of William Mitchell’s Great Wall of Kidderminster, and Emma Warren on the joys of Lewisham High Street. You can listen on Apple podcasts and all the usual podcast providers, plus you can find it on Spotify and Youtube. Thank you! x
How did I know so little about Tower of Power? It's gorgeous!
What a wonderful building. We're losing too much of this civic stuff - I hope this one survives, so I can take the Austin Maxi for a run up the A41 to see it some time.