Been & Gone – Lee Tower

Been & Gone

Lee Tower – Robert Marchant

While it is easy to be wise after any event, and all of us possess 20/20 vision when armed with hindsight, trying to give any benefit of the doubt to the architects and planners who were designing and shaping our lives in the late 1960s and early 1970s is a real stretch indeed!

The same people and philosophies that gave us the Tricorn with all of its many issues, and the MOD estate at Rowner, the erstwhile concrete jungle, were in turn responsible for the demolition of many buildings that probably could and should have been saved! Fashion really can be a fickle mistress!

One such building is undoubtedly the Art Deco tower that once adorned the seafront at Lee-on-the-Solent, but which sadly succumbed to the bulldozers in 1971. Its thirty-six year lifespan being by coincidence almost exactly the same as that of the Tricorn.

The Lee Tower complex was designed by the architects Yates, Cook & Derbyshire and was completed in 1935, just as the railway service to the seaside town was being withdrawn. There was also a pier which ran out from the railway station buildings, adjacent to the new tower complex.

The Lee Tower complex housed a cinema, restaurant and grand ballroom in a u-shaped building, with the tower itself reaching 120 feet (37 metres) into the air and offering stunning views of the Solent from the viewing platform at the top. The tower was bedecked in camouflage colours in the Second World War, in an effort to make it harder for enemy pilots to use the tower as a useful navigation marker as they attacked Portsmouth or Southampton.

After the war, the complex was a popular venue for a good night out, with the last bus back to Gosport often packed to the gunwales on a Friday or Saturday night. My own father recalled on more than one occasion the Sunday morning he woke up on the beach, close to the tower, after a particularly enjoyable evening out at the venue in the mid1950s! In the summer, the tower gave the seaside town a centrepiece, and, along with the swimming baths, a hundred yards or so to the west, people were attracted to the seafront in good numbers.

Sadly, as viewing habits changed, the cinema struggled to attract an audience, and the complex struggled to keep its head above the water through the 1960s, before it closed and the demolition men were invited in by Gosport Borough Council. The landmark was lost forever!

It is difficult to imagine the same decision being made today. It is not as if the land was desperately needed for another development or project that could not have been sited elsewhere. Today the site is a car park and war memorial, and you would be hard pressed to know the complex ever existed.

Copyright The Francis Frith Collection

A great shame, and it is hard not to think that, with some wit and imagination, the complex could have been saved and been a focal point for the town to this day, but as I said at the top, hindsight is always 20/20.