VIDEO: Massive boost for Selsey Pavilion restoration dreams

Selsey Pavilion Trust’s efforts to buy and restore the Selsey Pavilion have been rewarded with the promise of a £300k grant from the government’s Community Ownership Fund. The money will go towards buying and restoring the Selsey Pavilion, bringing it back to life for the benefit of the Selsey community.

Chairman of the Selsey Pavilion Trust, Christian Skelton is delighted with the news, rich reward for huge hard work so far – and massive encouragement to move forward with the project in the years to come. Announced as part of the Spring Budget, the Community Ownership Fund awarded £299,400 (£249,500 in capital funding and £49,900 in revenue funding) to the project after a competitive bidding process last December. The capital funding amounts to 50 per cent of the building’s sale price, together with a contribution towards essential maintenance and repairs. The revenue funding will cover all costs incurred during the purchase process, surveys and architectural planning for later phases.

“The building has been valued at £400,000 and this funding will put up £200,000 plus another £50,000 for urgent repairs like the floors need levelling before all the sections of the community can come in, plus also fire safety works and so on. We have got a heads of terms agreement with the owner that we are going to buy it. I have just spoken to a solicitor who's saying that there's no legal binding contract that we will be able buy it but we do have this agreement. We've got to raise effectively £250,000 but we've already got £35,000 ring fenced by the town council. That means we need to find another £215,000.” It's a big sum: “But it has just got considerably less daunting with this fantastic news that we have had. It is funding that gives us big opportunities to go to other foundations to try and get the rest of the money. We've got the thumbs up from the government for this project, that it's good for the community and should happen – and that should in itself make the whole thing a lot easier.”

The idea, as part of the initial works, after buying the building, is to put in retractable raked seating and theatre curtains “that would allow us, as soon as the floors are levelled and the fire and safety measures have been sorted, to be able to show seasonal cinema. We would be looking at spring and summer and a bit of autumn because we don't have heating at the moment. So that would be phase one – to buy it and to open with occasional cinema and comedians and so on. Phase two would be fundraising further down the line to turn it into somewhere that is heated and insulated and can open much more.”

It's a passion for Christian: “We moved to Selsey 11 years ago and the Pavilion was this now 110-year-old theatre and cinema on the high street right in the middle of the town that most people just walked by and didn't even glance at. It just captured my imagination. It was all shut up. This was even before the cafe was put in and I just used to walk past it and I fell in love with the building; I fell in love with the idea that it might one day open again. Across the country there are so many of these theatres that have been closed and then usually demolished and absolutely lost forever but this is a building that is still there and just carries such a lot of history. All sorts of people have performed there in the past especially in the 20s and 30s, and our vision is to get it back open again for the whole of the community.”

A key part of the plan is to reduce road traffic – by offering very good reasons to stay in Selsey, Christian added.