Features

Hoylake’s Parade Community Centre is celebrating its centenary with a special exhibition of 100 years of local memories.

The centre looking out across the Hoylake waterfront served as a school for seventy five years and after its closure in 1984 was saved from demolition by local volunteers who turned it in to a community centre.

Hoylake Parade School

Local historian Heather Chapman has compiled an exhibition to mark the Parade Centre’s centenary year

The free exhibition tracks the history of the building with separate displays for each decade and is open to the public from 10.30am to 3.30pm until 28 June, 2009.

A reunion of around 200 former staff and pupils will take place on Saturday 27 June, with attendees from around the world.

Heather Chapman started with virtually no archive material and had to interview ex pupils and carry out hours of research to piece together the building’s history, “It was a very painstaking job,” she recalls

Country dancing group 1932/33

“I looked through newspapers and in the 1909 newspapers I managed to find a couple of articles about the advertisments for the school and a new headmaster being appointed.

“The school opened on the 10 January 1910 and the first headmaster only lasted a year.

“He’d come from North Wales and I think he must have been homesick because he got an appointment in Colwyn Bay.

The school’s location nestling on the edge of the Hoylake dunes meant it was distant enough from Liverpool to be used as an evacuation location for schoolchildren, “During World War Two and all the panic at the beginning of the war there were 230 evacuees on the admission register,” Heather says.

“They were deposited by their parents and they could come and visit every two weeks at the weekend.

Staff & children at the Coronation fete

“Nothing was really happening with bombing and the children were very homesick so after a short while the great majority of evacuees were back home, some of them were only here two weeks.”

The centre has recreated an Edwardian classroom on the first floor, complete with a lifesize pupil in a dunces cap.

The classroom is being used by local schoolchildren as part of their history lessons.

The Parade Community Centre provides recreational facilites for adults and children with different rooms available for hire including two halls and an art room.

The exhibition is open daily from 10.30am to 3.30pm until Sunday, 28 June, 2009.