Tower and Town, April 2017

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Restoring The Memorial Hall

The Memorial Hall is a key building for Marlborough College, as well as an important venue for concerts, talks and performances for the town community. For those who drive up and down the Bath Road it is a familiar and striking sight. However, you may not know that it is being renovated due to both the expansion of the College and also the hundredth anniversary of the First World War. It is a highly important building for all the residents of Marlborough.

The College plans to expand the hall, so that instead of seating around five hundred people, it will be able to hold seven hundred. The intention is also to increase the prominence of the memorial to the 749 young men from the College who died in the two World Wars and to whom the hall is a memorial. Both the interior and exterior will be repaired and drastically upgraded so that everyone can enjoy a more pleasing experience there. As the Master of Marlborough College says it “will be fit for generations to come&rdqu;, showing that these improvements will be good enough well into the future.

The College department that is running the fundraising campaign is called 'A Legacy for Life' which sponsors many of the College's philanthropic projects such as the bursary funds. The aim of the campaign is to improve all of the students’ lives so that they can progress to help as many people as they can in their individual fields. They are hoping with this renovation they can inspire people to follow the legacy of those soldiers who gave their lives for the greater good.

The purpose of the refurbishment is to both represent what the Memorial Hall originally stood for, as a memorial to soldiers, and also to improve the experience for audiences and performers. These renovations can help make the performances and talks held in the Memorial Hall more enjoyable due to the improvements in both the general acoustics of the room and the technology for presentations. There will also be new methods of entrance and exit for those who cannot use the stairs by introducing a state-of-the-art lift. The allowance for more people inside the hall may also allow for lectures and talks to be more open to the public due to there not being a struggle for space. The only problem with the renovation is that it will take a year to be completed so it will close on Monday the 3rd of July 2017 and has a predicted re-opening of June 2018. We look forward to the results.

Ben Nuttall and Harry Alexander