Dance hall is part of new miners’ welfare

Stirling’s Miners’Welfare, at the foot of Upper Craigs, opened for the first time in early 1929.

It had been hoped, in a scheme involving Stirling Town Council, to build an institute and public baths but the proposal came to nothing.

Those involved in the planning of the welfare pressed ahead with plans for a hall and institute after receiving a grant for £3000, worth more than £200,000 today. It was this facility – directed towards the miners and their families in the area’ s two principal collieries, Millhall and Manor

Powis – that opened its doors in 1929.

One part of the new complex contained a 450-person capacity hall with a stage and tip-up chairs, of the same type as was used for the Kelvin Hall in Glasgow, and a pitchpine floor for dancing .

An `up-to-date and complete cinematograph and lantern apparatus’ had been installed in a fireproof projection room, and it was hoped the hall would be used for social occasions, meetings and dances.

The institute featured a `large and airy’ games room with space for about 100 people with an adjoining room containing five `first class billiard tables’. A reading room with space for 60 people and a `cheerful outlook’ up Burghmuir Road’ was also a feature of the institute.

A ladies section comprised a large room in which, it was hoped, there would be demonstrations in `housewifery and hygiene, etc’.

Other features of the new minersw Welfare were a baths section with three slipper baths and a large and well-equipped kitchen, committee room, and a fourapartment caretaker’s house