[3][4][5] Work on the new building began in 1960: it was designed by Sir Basil Spence in the Brutalist style,[6] was built by John Laing & Son[7] at a cost of £2.75 million and was officially opened by the Duke of Edinburgh on 14 October 1963.

[10] In March 2019, the County Council approved a proposal to move to a smaller new-build facility on the Sands car park at Freeman's Place in the centre of Durham.

[12][13][14] Richard Holden, Conservative member of parliament for North-West Durham, described the new council headquarters as a 'vanity project', questioning the suitability of the location as well as tax increases and cuts to services used to pay for the development.

[20] In 2019 the Council planned to demolish County Hall as part of a masterplan to redevelop the wider site at Aykley Heads as a business park with supporting retail, financial and professional, food and drink, non-residential institutions, and assembly and leisure uses, with associated landscaping, multi-storey and surface car parking.

[22] In 2025 the council announced that they were planning to enter a joint venture with a development partner in order to carry out this redevelopment, with the aim of creating 4,000 jobs across the innovation district as a whole (also taking in the Milburngate development and Durham University Business School in the Sands) and replicating the success of NETPark in Sedgefield.