Qualla: Pier Bandstand, Weymouth

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: Introduction

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Ridinghunter, CC BY-SA 3.0. On a spring afternoon in 1986, two Weymouth schoolgirls were chosen to push a button and detonate the underwater explosives that brought down their town's beloved seafront landmark. The Pier Bandstand had survived a world war, a 1960s reinvention as an amusement arcade, and forty-seven years of admission queues - but its reinforced concrete piles had finally rotted past saving. The engineering report was blunt: the structure could not be expected to carry the weight of the platform much longer. So the council chose two children, gave them the plunger, and brought the curtain down on Weymouth's strangest piece of Art Deco architecture in front of a crowd that had grown up dancing on it.

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Image: Ridinghunter | CC BY-SA 3.0

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: A Competition with Twenty-Six Entries

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit E.A. Schwerdtfeger & Co, London, Public domain. Weymouth Corporation announced the project in June 1936: a new bandstand and concert enclosure on the seafront, to replace the modest 1907 Burdon Bandstand on the same Esplanade site. An open architectural competition drew twenty-six designs. H. S. Goodhart-Rendel, one of the mos...

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Image: E.A. Schwerdtfeger & Co, London | Public domain

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: A Quarter of a Million Admissions

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Richard Rogerson, CC BY-SA 2.0. In its first summer season, more than 250,000 people paid to come aboard the bandstand. Then the war started. Admissions fell to 55,000 in 1940 and 50,000 in 1941; the bandstand was largely closed for the duration. It fully reopened in July 1944, with light repairs to the piles. ...

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Image: Richard Rogerson | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: The Slow Reinvention

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Andy Potter, CC BY-SA 2.0. By the 1960s, audiences for live bandstand entertainment had been thinned out by television and changing tastes. In 1967 the bandstand was redesigned to house an amusement arcade and rides instead. The concrete piles, already a quarter-century old in salt water, were repaired bet...

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Image: Andy Potter | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: The Big Bang

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Stephen Williams, CC BY-SA 2.0. The 1985 structural report from the engineers Lewis and Duvivier concluded what locals could already see in the cracked concrete: the piles had suffered severe deterioration and the bandstand was in an unsafe condition. The council decided to keep the entrance building, which sti...

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Image: Stephen Williams | CC BY-SA 2.0

Pier Bandstand, Weymouth: An Italian on the Esplanade

Wed, 20 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Photo credit Sarah Smith, CC BY-SA 2.0. The entrance building still stands at the northern end of the Esplanade. It very nearly didn't survive - in 1991 the council considered demolishing it for £68,000 before voting to keep it. In 1994 the local businessman Peter Bennett took over the lease and pushed through a refurb...

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Image: Sarah Smith | CC BY-SA 2.0