St James'S Church Hall

St James's Church Hall, formerly known as St James' Sabbath School, is a church hall located on Church Street in Poole. It was built in 1862 and altered in 1956. The building is constructed of red brick with stone dressings and features coloured diaper work, with some parts rendered, and has a tiled roof. It is designed in the Gothic Revival style and has a rectangular plan. The hall is two storeys high and has a seven-window range, articulated by full-height buttresses topped with steep weathered caps. There is a plinth and a moulded first-floor cill band with a moulded cornice.

The entrances at both ends are shallow two-centre arches with chamfered splayed surrounds, and there are double doors at the right-hand end, with a mid-20th century passage opening on the left. The windows are also two-centre arches with mid-20th century glazing. Inside, there is a meeting room featuring a coved plaster ceiling and a moulded cornice, as well as a gallery in the southern extension supported by fluted cast-iron columns with a panelled front.

Historically, the building was founded as the St James' Sabbath School, and its Gothic style is more reflective of the earlier 19th-century Commissioners' Gothic rather than the Ecclesiological Gothic that emerged in the 1840s. The hall was damaged by a bomb during the Second World War but was subsequently restored. Originally, it had matching arched doorways at both ends.