The De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea Got Restored

It is hard to believe that five years ago the De La Warr Pavilion at Bexhill-on-Sea, the most important pre-war Modernist building in the country, perhaps the only one of real international importance, was on the point of being turned into a Wetherspoon pub.

A philistine local council, faced with what it saw as a white elephant eating up 10 per cent of their annual budget, thought that the only solution was to offload the building as quickly as possible.

If that meant turning Eric Mendelsohn and Serge Chermayeff's grade-one listed masterpiece into a centre for binge drinking then so be it.

This was counsel of despair, not only for the pavilion but for Bexhill itself.

The De La Warr Pavilion was the one thing that lifted Bexhill out of the ordinary.

Yet, at just the moment when towns and cities around the country were chasing lottery funds to kickstart regeneration with their own versions of the Bilbao Guggenheim, Bexhill was trying to close theirs down.

The council backed down.

An independent trust was formed to take on the building, a successful lottery application brought money from both the Heritage Lottery Fund and the Arts Council to restore the building and make it fit for exhibitions of the highest