Architect Barnard has left his mark around the county
TEWKESBURY people of a maturing vintage will remember the Sabrina cinema, which stood on the spot occupied by the Roses Theatre.
Opened in 1934, the purpose-built, 700 seater with stalls and a balcony was built by the local firm of Collins and Godfrey at a cost of £10,000.
Inside and out the Sabrina was typical of what’s been called the Odeon Art Deco style.
The architect was Leonard William Barnard (1870 to 1951). That’s him with the moustache, back row, eighth from the left in the picture of Leckhampton Lads’ Brigade and Scouts taken in 1910.
Barnard took over as principal in 1927 of an architectural firm in Imperial Square, Cheltenham.
The firm took his name, but traced its roots back to the mid-19th century founder John Middleton.
Originally from Darlington, John Middleton came to Cheltenham and virtually cornered the local market in church building.
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In the town, All Saints, Holy Apostles, St Mark’s, St Philip and St James, plus St Stephens are all examples of his work.
Under Barnard’s control this specialization continued and his firm carried out numerous commissions for churches in Gloucestershire and south Wales.
Leonard Barnard lived in Leckhampton and was a member of St Peter’s congregation.
He designed the pulpit, carved from an oak that grew in the adjacent Church Meadow and the war memorial on the corner of Hall Road, which incidentally marks the spot where the old village well used to be.
Leonard Barnard was a leader of the Leckhampton Church Lads’ Brigade prior to the First World War.
It’s a poignant thought that the names of boys he must have known in the Lads’ Brigade a few years later appeared on the memorial he designed.
When Hesters Way was being built in the early 1950s, Barnard’s firm was responsible for the Monks Croft flats at the junction of Princess Elizabeth Way and Gloucester Road. Quite distinct in appearance from other blocks on the estate, these flats were earmarked for people coming to work at GCHQ when it relocated to Cheltenham from Bletchley Park, via London.
The stark, Bauhaus influenced design wasn’t to everyone’s taste and Barnard’s blocks were locally called Stalingrad House.
Although the Sabrina, which closed in the 1960s, was the only complete cinema Barnard’s designed, the firm drew up plans for the foyer and upstairs lounge of the Daffodil cinema in Cheltenham’s Suffolk Place, in fact it was one of the first jobs they did in 1927 when Leonard Barnard took over. Italian craftsmen were brought in to carry out the work.