11, Custom House Quay

The building at 11 Custom House Quay is a sailors' Bethel, later used as a Seamen's Institute and the Royal Dorset Yacht Club, and now a club and restaurant. It was opened in June 1866. The structure is built of dark grey brick in a Flemish bond pattern, with painted stone trim and a slate roof.

The building has a long, narrow plan, with a deliberately angled gable facing the quay, which conceals a lower-pitched roof behind. It is two storeys high. The front facade features a stepped triple blind round-arched opening with small open oculi, beneath a continuous stepped label course. Below this are five vertical, deep-set lights arranged as an arcade, featuring slender three-quarter colonnettes supporting plain, flush arches, all under a continuous stepped label, and sitting on a full-width sill band. The ground floor has three arches: a pair of glazed doors with a plain fanlight on the left, a central pair of plank doors with a fanlight, and a plain window on the right, all set within a flush band and arches with a continuous stepped label and run-out stops. There is a stone plinth and a deep sill band on the lower floor, and brick pilaster quoins carry a deep moulded gable cornice, embellished with leaf carvings. The rear wall is brick, with a hipped roof, and includes two small, three-light casements at the eaves and a large, flat-roofed extension.

The interior has a large, open ground floor space with some later partitions. It contains lightweight banded cast-iron columns with palmette capitals and bracketed heads, arranged in two rows. A straight, openwork iron staircase rises to the open first floor, which features a deep coved ceiling with a series of central cast-iron vents and access hatches.

A photograph from 1903 refers to the building as the Seamen's Bethel. An advertisement from 1866 indicates it was initially intended as a “plain but neat Bethel, with a Reading Room” and was built on a site secured with the assistance of Sir F Johnstone Bart. The building is designed in a vaguely Venetian style and makes a prominent statement on the quayside. Apart from some later, lightweight partitioning, the interior appears largely unaltered.