Report - The Meads Club - Eastbourne - East Sussex - March 2018

[The Explorer Returns]

This is the old Meads Club in Eastbourne! Not a lot of history but I know it closed in 2007. The site was sold for £200,000 in 2005 but that fell through and is now up for sale for 1million.

The Explorer: I've been to this location so many times over the past 2 years, but never uploaded anything. It's gone down hill really quickly, in 2014 it was a perfect and mint building but now it's a deck and it won't be long before the building collapses. Access has been the same for years, they even boarded it up and left the building open which is strange!

 

[Yorrick]

Nice little find.

Formerly the Meads Institute, but originally the 'Secular Mechanics Institute'.

Mechanics institutes were created as a place to teach (usually) adults without any reference to religion or theology. It was a movement against the theology based teaching of the board schools of the time, - “A visible challenge to all theologians and an assertion of the principle that human destiny is shaped not on the knees of the gods, but in the hearts and brains of men and women”

Planning for conversion to housing was refused on the grounds of “surely a better use can be found for it”. Seems not