Grant targeted to convert Blitz theatre into Home Front tribute

The National Civilian Second World War Memorial Trust wants to transform the former National Picture Theatre in Beverley Road, Hull, into a Home Front tribute in honour of the 1,200 city residents who died in Nazi bombing raids.

The site’s owners, Reid Park Properties, have offered to sell it to the trust with the adjoining Swan Inn pub for £250,000, subject to a £25,000 deposit, and the trust is preparing to apply for a £500,000 grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund by the end of the month.

To give the bid every chance of success, the trust has enlisted the support of David Green, who was instrumental in securing a £7.7m HLF grant for the creation of Hull History Centre.

Trust secretary Alan Canvess said: “We have been encouraged to apply by the Heritage Lottery Fund because they see this as a unique site but it’s clear we have got to be so careful to get it right and the advice and help of David Green will be invaluable to us.”

If successful, the grant could take up to two years to be processed so the trust is continuing to seek the support of local businesses and individuals through a fundraising campaign to secure the vital first £25,000.

It is also applying for charitable status to make it easier to attract other grants and is launching a recruitment drive to gain more members.

Membership of the trust costs £7.50 and application forms should be available on its website from today.

Mr Canvess said: “More than 1,000 people have signed up to support the campaign to deliver this so if we could get 500 members that would be great.”

Both the trust and the owners were given planning permission to develop the site by the city council last month.

Reid Park Properties was granted approval to build a restaurant and flats, while under the trust’s plans the theatre’s handsome brick frontage and the building’s shell would be conserved, and plaques bearing the names of the dead would be hung on the walls.

The site would also house a separate educational building for schoolchildren.

The inn - which is about 111 years old and is the last remaining bow-fronted pub in East Yorkshire - would be converted back to its wartime layout and would house a micro-brewery, which is intended to be self-financing.

Mr Canvess said he was also exploring the possibility of establishing a community shares scheme to deliver the pub project.

On top of the cost of purchasing the site, the development and restoration work is expected to cost a further £750,000.

The grade two listed cinema in Beverley Road is the only blitzed civilian building ruin left standing in England and has been described as of “iconic importance”.

The theatre has lain untouched since it was attacked by the Luftwaffe at about 10pm on March 17, 1941.

In a cruel irony, the bombs fell as the cinema was showing Charlie Chaplin’s satire The Great Dictator.

Unable to get to shelters because of the severity of the raid, 150 people crammed into the foyer and remarkably all survived when an airborne mine landed at the rear of premises, destroying the screen and gutting the building.

As it was consistently referred to as a “North East town” in contemporary reports of the bombing, Hull’s wartime suffering was not widely known, although historians now believe it was the most bombed British city outside London.

A total of 86,715 homes were damaged – 94 per cent of the entire housing stock – and 152,000 people were made homeless, more than half the population.

Hull also has the unfortunate distinction of suffering the first daylight air raid of the war and the last piloted raid, the latter on March 17, 1945.