Showboat Social Club

The Showboat Social Club is a theatre built between 1906 and 1908 by C.F. Ward from Birmingham. It was converted into a cinema in 1913, a ballroom in 1956, and became a social club in 1968. The building is constructed of brick with painted buff-terracotta dressings and features Welsh slate roofs in a classical style. It has two storeys and a mezzanine, with a central one-bay section flanked by slightly projecting one-bay staircase towers.

The centre has renewed doors set in a wide chamfered opening beneath a renewed fascia. There is a blocked semi-circular mezzanine window surrounded by heavy moulding, with an enriched keystone and spandrels. The first floor showcases a three-bay quasi-Ionic Order with blocked windows, segment-plan balustraded balconies, and a segmental pediment featuring an enriched escutcheon in the middle, flanked by balustraded parapets.

The towers have renewed doors in corniced architraves and blocked three-light windows on the ground floor. There are also blocked semi-circular mezzanine windows with keyed archivolts and shaped aprons. Rusticated clasping pilaster strips flank the blocked round-headed windows on the second stage, which have blind tympana and enriched aprons in segmental-pedimented quasi-Ionic surrounds, along with enriched tympana and spandrels. The building is topped with a coved cornice and pyramidal roofs that include wooden lanterns.

To the left, there is a lower one-bay wing with oculi featuring keyed architraves and enriched aprons on both the mezzanine and left first floor. The ground floor has been altered. The right side includes a three-storey, five-bay dressing-room wing with segmental pediments over blocked paired windows, flanked by pilaster strips, and has also been altered on the ground floor. Further to the right is a two-bay staircase wing. The building was formerly known as the Hippodrome Theatre/Cinema and the Astoria Ballroom.