Bexhill Heritage volunteers are restoring the historic Shelter 4, East Parade, Bexhill, ahead of the official opening on April 19 2025.
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00:00We've been here since November 2023, and what we're doing, we're fully restoring this grade
00:08two listed seafront shelter.
00:11It was built in 1921, so it's a venerable old lady, to put it mildly, and Rother District
00:18Council started the project by removing the old paint, and we then came in and we had
00:27to dry the whole thing out because it got very, very wet, and we had the difficult job
00:32of getting the wooden surface ready for painting, and that took several months because it was
00:38wet, needed drying, and we had to really work hard on that with different grays of sandpaper,
00:44etc.
00:45So that was the worst bit of the job by far.
00:48The bench restoration, we've had some help from the Men's Shed, they stripped the paint
00:55off the teak slats and repainted them for us, and that was a great contribution that
01:00the Men's Shed made.
01:02What we've done, we've had the bench arms, the metal bits, sandblasted down to bare metal,
01:10we've put five coats of paint on those, hopefully they'll stand up against the salt air and
01:16the water, and the woodwork has also had five or sometimes six coats of paint.
01:23We're now applying, here, the third coat of gloss to the columns.
01:30Candy twist columns, they're almost like a fairground, they're lovely, really well constructed,
01:35and we think that that will help them to last another hundred years, we certainly hope so.
01:43Repaint will be necessary after three years, so no doubt we'll be asked to do that, but
01:48it won't take quite as long, as we've put 3,000 personnel into the project already,
01:56and the windows, there are 320 of them, and each window has four pieces of beading, which
02:04were made for us by Iphilsham Joinery, and those pieces of beading have been inserted
02:09by hand by the volunteers here, three tacks in each, so it's easy to work out how many
02:15tacks were used, and we're into the thousands of tacks, and we have yet to install a heritage
02:24gallery at the eastern end of the shelter.
02:27So we've got a series of superimposed images with support of Bexhill Museum, and they're
02:33going to be going along as an art gallery at the bottom windows here, Shelter No. 4
02:38on the east side, and the idea is to show Bexhill as it was, compared to as it is today.
02:47So there's a series of photos here that I've gone back and retaken, and superimposed the
02:55old into the new as it were.
02:56There's the Metro Park on West Parade there, which is the lawns now, and then we've got
03:03the War Memorial, which in wartime had lots of sandbags around it, and different buildings
03:14as you can see there that have been changed in the 1970s.
03:20And that was the Delaware Gates, long gone now, at the bottom of Sea Road.
03:31And the Ritz Cinema, which is now the Telephone Exchange, so it's kind of tricky, a lot of
03:37these to line up to where they are today.
03:41And you've got St George's Cinema and Theatre.
03:48Well we've got to finish the benches, we've got three of those to do, we're finishing
03:52some of the gloss coats, we've got some concrete repairs needed on the floor, and the next
03:58thing that will happen after that is that the boarding will be removed and replaced
04:02with fencing, because we have parts of the underside of the roof to do, where the boarding
04:08has been covering that part of the roof, and at the moment there's no paint on it.
04:12So that needs doing, and then we'll be ready for opening on April the 19th, which is Easter
04:20Saturday, and I hope people will come and have a look, and listen to the Chair of Rother
04:25District Council as he opens it and cuts the ribbon.