MARINE COURT - ST. LEONARDS
Marine Court is to this day one of my favourite buildings along the south coast. It was designed by architects Kenneth Dalgleish and Roger Pullen and is an early example of steel-frame and concrete construction. For their inspiration the architects turned to the then recently commissioned Cunard White-Star Line’s Queen Mary. The east end of Marine Court is shaped to imitate the curved, stacked bridge front of the Queen Mary; the eastern restaurant served to imitate the fo’c’sle (*1) deck of the ship.
It is widely reported that it’s build cost, of close to £500,000, was way over budget and some other interesting statistics include –
Construction materials
2,000 tons of cement
2,500 tons of sand
1,400,000 building bricks
22,000 square feet of glass
14,000 tons of ballast
2,100 tons of steel
3,000 gallons of paint
The building contains
6 acres of partitions
7 miles of skirting
5½ acres of floors
14 acres of ceilings and wall plastering
2,000 doors
Five hundred men were directly employed on the site throughout construction while hundreds more would have been found work in the local factories and other businesses supplying the vast amount of materials needed.
When viewed from the east or west Marine Court is tall and slender, from the beach the full expanse of the building dwarfs all those on the seafront and when you look at the numbers the fact it dwarfs other buildings on the seafront is perhaps no surprise. It is 14 storeys high and from basement to roof, measures 170ft or 49m in height and from east to west is 416ft or 127 metres in length.
For more info check out this article:
https://www.hastingsinfocus.co.uk/2018/05/10/from-land-and-sea-the-iconic-structure-that-defines-the-st-leonards-seafront/
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