Southport Winter Gardens

Southport Winter Gardens Artist drawing from 1874

The building had two Germano-Gothic pavilions, one of which held a concert hall known as the 'Pavilion', while the other was the iron and glass Winter Garden (known as the 'Conservatory'). The Pavilion had a capacity for 2,500 people and the Winter Garden was a total 180 ft in length with a maximum height of 80 ft. (In comparison, the central section of the Kew Palm House is just over 137 ft long and 63 ft high.) Southport Winter Garden was advertised as the largest conservatory in England and being the first seaside Winter Garden in the UK. Refreshment rooms and an aquarium filled the basement level.

Although it was one of the biggest buildings ever to grace an English sea front, the Winter Garden was not a great commercial success. The Southport Pavilion and Winter Gardens Company, which promoted it was locally based and had wide support in the town and throughout the north-west with 350 shareholders at its peak, but the addition of Frank Matcham's Opera House on an adjacent site in 1890–91 strained the capital base too far, and the Company went into liquidation in 1898. Many companies rapidly came and went in an effort to save the Winter Gardens in an attempt to turn a profit. Entertainments were lost or driven downmarket, until the Winter Garden was converted into a ballroom and roller skating rink, and the Pavilion became a cinema. Eventually both were demolished, the Winter Garden in 1933 and the Pavilion in 1962.[1]

The Ribble Building is a former Victorian building that was built on the site of the Winter Gardens to house the Southport Lord Street railway station The Station opened on 1 September 1884 as the Southport & Cheshire Lines Extension Railway's (SCLER) northern terminus, which provided an alternative route to Liverpool City Centre from Southport, which ran coastally through the Sand Dunes. The last trains left the station on Saturday, 5 January 1952.

After the closure of the railway station Southport Lord Street Station was taken over by Ribble Buses. The spaces in between the platforms were filled in, but the rest of the interior remained the same. The train shed remained in use by the bus company until Ribble Buses ceased to operate from the building in the early 1990s. The train shed was later demolished but the frontage on Lord Street was retained and still exists today. In 2014 it was internally converted and opened as a Travelodge Hotel.

The Ribble Building in 2007