The Winter Gardens

The Winter Gardens, South Beach Parade, Great Yarmouth

The Winter Gardens is a cast iron and glass structure originally designed and constructed in Torquay by John Watson and William Harvey between 1878 and 1881 at a cost of £12,783. The ironwork was manufactured by Jesse Tildesley of the Crescent Iron Works, Willenhall in Staffordshire. The building was dismantled and relocated to Great Yarmouth in 1904, where it was re-erected by the entrance to Wellington Pier under the supervision of Great Yarmouth Borough Council's Surveyor, J W Cockrill, who had purchased it for £1,300. It is recorded that no pane of glass was broken during the removal and transport by barge to Norfolk.

The structure consists of a cast iron frame and glass on a plinth covered with L-shaped Cockrill-Doulton tiles. The plan is rectangular, approximately 170 feet long running east-west, with short gabled transepts projecting to the north, south and west at the west end. The building comprises a long single-storey gabled range aligned east-west. A square tower and lantern of 83 feet 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 containing 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 features floral and scroll motifs with a central roundel in the apex, and the transepts have an upper tier of arched glazing.

The interior nave is supported on braced lattice girders with floral motifs. The tower and lantern rest on pierced corner bracing and box-frame supports. An additional late twentieth-century inner frame braces the original structure, and there are some twentieth-century bars and partitions. The 1909 maple flooring of the roller skating rink survives.

The Winter Gardens were not a commercial success in Torquay. Cockrill, however, foresaw that their removal to Yarmouth would be desirable "to lengthen the season with better class visitors, and on wet days to provide for 2,000 persons under cover." Following the relocation, Cockrill added a brick-arched entrance porch for a cloakroom and in 1909 laid a maple floor for roller skating. The building was used for concerts, dancing and skating, with the interior adorned by flower beds, trailing plants and displays in hanging baskets. An organ was positioned above the entrance at the west end. In the late twentieth century, the glazing panels in the roof were replaced and a separate structural frame was inserted to support the tower and lantern.