Winter Gardens Complex

• Theatre ID
  1849
• Built / Converted
  1875
• Current state
  Extant
• Current use
  —
• Address
  Church Street, Blackpool, Lancashire, FY1 1HL, England

Details

The Winter Gardens is a vast entertainments complex containing a number of individual elements built round a pre-existing house (still just discernible) over a long period between 1875 and 1939. The first part opened was an outdoor skating rink in July 1875. Grand opening of the complex was in July 1878. The Winter Gardens, together with the Tower and its attendant buildings (including the Tower Ballroom & Circus, q.v.) established Blackpool as the premier brash seaside resort - the one that the others could only aspire to be. Its success owed much to the management of William Holland, appointed in 1887. It is interesting to note that Pevsner wrote in 1969: ‘The Ministry...has issued no list for Blackpool, which means that there are no buildings of architectural or historic interest in the town. It depends of course what you mean by historical and by architectural.’ It does indeed! To be fair, the listing investigators have more recently paid careful attention to Blackpool, recognising that it has its own outstandingly important social history and something in the way of quite special architecture. There is much to celebrate in Blackpool. The parts of the Winter Gardens we have found to be of particular interest are described separately following this item as: I Winter Gardens Pavilion, 1878-97 II Empress Ballroom, 1896-97 III The Opera House, 1889, 1912 & 1939 The Winter Gardens has a complicated history, traced by Brereton & Slinn in a 1984 Theatrephile article. It contains other components of lesser but still noteworthy interests. The exotic Indian Lounge has, regrettably, gone but the Spanish Hall (by Andrew Mazzei, c.1929), Baronial Hall and Renaissance Room remain and have a kind of impermanent ‘atmospheric cinema’ quality which goes well with this kind of exhibitionistic entertainment building. It has to be said that parts of the complex come fully to life only during conferences.

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• Events
  • Design/Construction: See also entries for individual Winter Gardens elements
  • 1875 Alteration:
    • Thomas Mitchell of Oldham - Architect
  • 1897 Alteration: Empress Ballroom, Palm House and Indian Lounge added
    • Mangnall & Littlewood - Architect
  • 1928 Alteration: Ferris wheel removed and Olympia Hall built
    • Unknown - Architect
  • 1929 Alteration: Spanish Hall and Baronial Hall added
    • Andrew Mazzei - Architect
  • 1929 - 1931 Alteration: Array alteration to Coronation Street front and to main entrance façade; internal restyling
    • J O Derham - Architect
  • 1964 Alteration: Indian Lounge replaced by Planet Room
    • - Architect
  • 1989 Alteration: major refurbishment of whole complex, removing much 1960s applied tat
    • Unknown - Architect
  • 1896 Design/Construction:
    • J M Boekbinder - Consultant: Plasterwork And Decorations
  • 1875 Owner/Management: Winter Gardens Company
  • 1928 Owner/Management: Blackpool Tower Company
  • 1986 Owner/Management: First Leisure Corporation
  • 1998 Owner/Management: Leisure Parcs Ltd
• Listings
  • Grade II* - The complex is listed as a whole but the individual elements are described separately in this database