Last week I was cataloguing a film (AV260/30) by Alan E Turner, an amateur filmmaker from Romsey. The film was called 'West Country Holiday' and having a title is always useful, especially when it identifies the area shown in the film. Inter-titles are even more useful and luckily for us Mr Turner included inter-titles in most of his films. These are titles which appear throughout the film, usually indicating a change of location. In this particular film there was an inter-title Ilfracombe, followed by some footage of the seaside resort of Ilfracombe in the 1930s. The footage is lovely, showing lots of beautiful buildings, some great footage of the Lynton to Lynmouth Cliff Railway, and including this building shown in the image below. I tried with Google Maps, walking about the streets of Ilfracombe in Google street view, looking at tourist websites for Ilfracombe but I just could not identify this building.
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| © Wessex Film and Sound Archive, AV966/30 - the Victoria Pavilion, Ilfracombe |
I decided to try Twitter as this has been successful before in identifying buildings, particularly when we have the name of the town to help. This time I didn't even need to send messages to local tourist websites, I just posted the image on Twit Pic with a message on Twitter asking if anyone knew what this building was - you can see the response in the second image. People are so helpful - I posted the request for information on the 10th of March and the replies from two individuals both came in the same day!
It turns out the building is the Victoria Pavilion. It was built in the 1920s but in 1994 the decision was made that the costs to continue repairing it were too high and the building was demolished and replaced with the Landmark Theatre. I used various online sources to verify the identification of the building and gather information on it but I would never have found any of this without the help from our followers on Twitter. Or I should correct that, I might have found it, if I had been able to track down a book of old photographs of Ilfracombe but there just isn't that kind of time to devote to identifying one building so the use of social media such as Twitter are invaluable in this respect.
The building is in fact the Victorian Pavilion built for the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee as the entrance has been rebuilt in stone at about the time the cine film was shot, the original front was iron frame and glass as was the rest It was know by locals when built as "The Shelter"and would have had seats also flower planters inside.The location of the pavilion was in front of Capstone Hill in which was fronted by a lovely green of Victorian Style. this had a stone walled frontage in which Wilder Road ran past.I remember The Pavilion was still standing in 1979 as a 14 year old but I believe that It was demolished in about 1997 at this time the complete front face of it was rebuilt in stone.I hope that this may be useful in futher research.
ReplyDeleteThe building is in fact the Victorian Pavilion built for the Queen Victoria's Diamond Jubilee as the entrance has been rebuilt in stone at about the time the cine film was shot, the original front was iron frame and glass as was the rest It was know by locals when built as "The Shelter"and would have had seats also flower planters inside.The location of the pavilion was in front of Capstone Hill in which was fronted by a lovely green of Victorian Style. this had a stone walled frontage in which Wilder Road ran past.I remember The Pavilion was still standing in 1979 as a 14 year old but I believe that It was demolished in about 1997 at this time the complete front face of it was rebuilt in stone.I hope that this may be useful in futher research.
ReplyDeleteThanks Mark, it's great to have that additional information!
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