Jak's blog
This is the blog's tagline

Recently I've been reading a blog about all the skating rinks that are suddenly available in London as the Christmas season approaches. This has been the case for the last couple of years, and it has rolled out around the country too.

[More:]

It brought back a few memories. Here is a pic of my two girls at the Hampton Court one, two years ago when Eryn would have been only 3 and a half.

When her mother was not much older than that, I took her to learn to skate at a short lived rink in the Pavilion in Torquay.

That beautiful, listed Victorian building has had several lives. When I was a child, it was our one professional theatre, and where each year, my sister and I were taken to see the pantomime as the final Christmas treat. When the new Princess Theatre was proposed and built, close to the pier that now bounds the marina, the Pavilion became redundant. The building later housed the ice skating rink, which soon folded, leaving the way clear for the shopping mall with a bar and restaurant upstairs, that still exists.

Torquinians like myself are fond of the old Pavilion and the council is now trying to raise funds to give it a face lift. Meanwhile The Princess needs upgrading and there are plans afoot to offer a developer some land beside it for a new hotel if they will also fork out the necessary for the theatre. On the other side of the road, Rock Walk is now unrecognisable and hidden behind blue hoarding while it is 'made safe'. It seems that, before long the whole face of the sea front will be changed.

But they can't do away with the Pavilion, only restore it thanks to English Heritage. Here it is in all its glory, a view taken from the seaward side that I found in the public domain on Wikimedia Commons.