Ahead of you is a red-brick Victorian hall with a symmetrical five-bay front, an arched open porch on short columns, and a curving Dutch gable topped by a small round oculus window.
Bulwell grew fast in the early eighteen seventies, powered largely by brickmaking, so the new local board of health decided it needed a proper headquarters and chose this spot beside the River Leen. In fact, they moved with surprising confidence and managed to hold one meeting here before Nottingham annexed Bulwell on the first of November, eighteen seventy-seven... a very tidy bit of municipal drama. Even so, the building itself did not reach full completion until eighteen ninety-four.
Look at the front and you can see the ambition. The middle section has a loggia, basically an open porch, with Corinthian columns - the fancy classical kind with leafy capitals. Above it are round-headed openings with quatrefoils, those four-lobed shapes that look a bit like carved stone flowers. If you glance at the photo in the app, the street view helps show that formal Victorian face.
This place then reinvented itself repeatedly: Bulwell Public Hall for concerts and variety shows, then a cinema, then dance nights, and after the Second World War, the Embassy Ballroom. The interior image on your screen hints at that life, with the old hall and stage frame, called a proscenium arch. Later came offices, a furniture showroom, the Take Five Theatre School of Dancing, and since two thousand and twelve, Bulwell Fight Factory. Town hall to boxing gym is quite a career.
This building survives by refusing to stay only one thing.
When you're ready, continue on to St Mary the Virgin and All Souls, and I'll pick up the story there.
