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The Scandal of Weymouth's Jubilee Hall
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Weymouth and Portland Borough Council pursued a grandiose scheme in the 1980s for a huge new shopping centre in the heart of Weymouth. Nothing wrong with that except that, having demolished many old and interesting buildings, the site lay unused - Weymouth's infamous 'bombsite' - for over a decade. One of the buildings demolished was the Victorian Jubilee Hall - one of the finest surviving iron-framed buildings in the country - which had served as a cinema in St Thomas Street. The three drawings below show the ornate and wonderful design of this building before being vandalised. |
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| A sad day for conservation. Weymouth's Victorian Jubilee Hall is demolished and the pieces taken to be dumped in a quarry on Portland. | |
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In response to a huge public outcry, the Council agreed to dismantle the Jubilee Hall and store it safely until it could be re-erected to house some worthy project, possibly a museum. |
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This is the 'safe storage' - the cast iron girders elaborately decorated in the Egyptian Style lay in 1989 exposed to the rain, wind and stone dust in a quarry at Perryfields opposite Pennsylvania Castle. |
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Geoffrey Poole, a well-known lover of old Weymouth, campaigned long and hard to save this building but this is the result of all his efforts and those of his many supporters. The extent of this scandal was such that it was widely report in the national press and in Private Eye magazine. |
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The previous pictures were taken in 1989. These next four photographs show the state of this 'preserved antiquity' in October 2002 - the iron is rusted, the carved stone fittings smashed and the superb Victorian paintings gone from the pillars. What a disaster! |
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