I really feared for this building when year after year it has been allowed to fall into a dilapidated state with seemingly no plan for its regeneration. Now there is hope that it will be restored to its former glory and turned into an attraction that includes restaurants, cafes and much more.
This is an iconic building that I remember from my childhood as a place for dancing, as a beer cellar and many other things. To have it decay on a grand scale has been awful. It has a fascinating history.
The original structure was not intended for Great Yarmouth at all. It was designed and constructed in Torquay by John Watson and William Harvey between 1878 and 1881 at a cost of £12,783 (approx £1.5m today). The ironwork was by Jess Tildesley of Staffordshire. The structure wasn't a success in Torquay and so was taken apart piece by piece and re-constructed in Great Yarmouth where it was felt it would have a brighter future.
The structure has a cast iron frame and is 170 ft in length. According to the Historic England website the structure comprises a long single-storey, gabled range aligned east-west. A square tower and lantern of 83ft height above the west end has a pyramidal roof topped with an urn finial on a sculpted base. Square section columns with Corinthian capitals to the lower stage and palmette capitals above, divide the structure into tripartite panels each generally with three lights of six glazes over nine. Above and below are contiguous solid rectangular panels, some with a central ventilation roundel, but blank on the tower stages. Each gable-end has floral and scroll motifs with a central roundel in the apex, and the transepts have an upper tier of arched glazing. So now you know.
The decision to bring it to Great Yarmouth was made by borough council surveyor J. W. Cockrill who felt that it would lengthen the holiday season and bring "a better class visitor" to the resort. On wet days it would provide shelter for 2,000 people.
The Winter Gardens was purchased for £1,300 - a fraction of the original costs and about £150,000 at today's prices. The building was dismantled in sections, transported by barge to Norfolk and re-erected at the entrance to the Wellington Pier in 1904. Despite the long journey not a single pane of glass was broken. Cockrill added a brick entrance arch and porch to act as a cloakroom and in 1909 a maple floor was laid for roller skating. The building was subsequently also used for concerts, dancing and even a German Beer Cellar. There were floral displays inside and an organ above the entrance to the west end.
In the late 20th century the glazing panels in the roof were replaced and some structural work undertaken.
The Winter Gardens is a Grade II listed building due to its rarity. It is the last surviving seaside Victorian cast iron and glass winter gardens in the country. It is also of great architectural and historical interest. When constructed it was one of the three largest cast iron and glass seaside winter gardens in England. It is also largely still intact.
The venue has been closed for over 11 years and it was said that it has been "deteriorating daily." In 2018 the Victorian Society listed it amongst its top 10 buildings "crying out to be saved."
Darren Barker from Great Yarmouth Preservation Trust summed up the attraction of the Winter Gardens:
"Great Yarmouth Winter Gardens is a people’s palace of glass and steel, a seafront cathedral of light, the shock of the new, the future washed up on a Norfolk beach.
"A landmark structure gleaming and brilliant in the hot Norfolk summers and complimenting huge East Anglian skies. At night the building was flooded with electric light which beamed out across the seafront and reflected back on the sea. As radical and unnerving as the new moving picture houses springing along the parade.
"In 1903 this must have been powerful stuff, a new century and an indication of how we would all live our lives in the future. Strangely modern and with the building stuff full of exotic plants, a theatre of botany, which allowed the paying public the chance to see glimpses of faraway places, through an eclectic collection of plants from all corners of a flagging empire and beyond.
For the millions of holiday makers, packing the resort in the early decades of the twentieth century, escaping for a few days from the factories and the daily grind, the Winter Gardens was an unexpected paradise. As much part of the experience as the sticks of Docwra rock, the pleasure beach rides and “sands of finest brown sugar”.
Sadly as the British seaside diminished in popularity, so did the Winter Gardens as it slumped to its present condition. Now there is hope of brighter days for this iconic national building and hope that once again it can be enjoyed by visitors.