Northampton Civic Centre

Behind the Crown and County Court building, in Upper Mounts The Mounts Police Station, Fire Station and Swimming Baths (1936-41). These buildings are all that was realised of a planned civic centre for Northampton, made possible by the closure in 1922 of the Victorian (and earlier) Northampton prison that previously occupied the site. J C Prestwich and Sons of Leigh, Lancashire (Ernest Prestwich), best known perhaps for Salford Town Hall (1934) won an architectural competition in 1931 for the buildings that we see today. The fire station was dismissed by Pevsner as 'desperately uninspired', but we might disagree! The swimming baths, built at a cost of £52,500, is an interesting building with tiered clerestories supported on a series of elliptical transverse arches, somewhat reminiscent of the Royal Horticultural Society Hall, Westminster by Easton and Robertson (1928). The baths were opened on 3 October 1936 by Councillor WJ Bassett-Loake, Chairman of the Baths Committee.

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