Gulliver's Kingdom staff volunteer help with key moment of Matlock Bath Pavilion restoration

The charitable company which owns the Grand Pavilion, on South Parade, is carrying out extensive works to revive the Edwardian structure for community use and recently reached a threshold moment.

When Nick Phillips, director of Gulliver’s Theme Park Resorts, heard that the volunteers needed help to replace a set of main doors, he set the company’s joiners to the job.

Nick said: “As a family run business with parks in the heart of the community we work closely with businesses and charities in the areas we operate in.

“The Grand Pavilion is a beautiful building and has a big role in Matlock Bath. It holds a special significance for me personally as I spent many an evening in my younger years enjoying a night out there, sometimes with Marcus Smith who was involved in the joinery work.

He added: “This not only helps to keep the building secure for the charity but also is perfectly fitting with the grandeur and period of the pavilion.”

Marcus fashioned the new doors in the Gulliver’s workshop in Tansley alongside colleagues Jozsef Gonczi and Ben Crowther, who then fitted them on site.

Nick Whitehead, chairman of the Grand Pavilion said: “We were over the moon when Nick offered to help us. Our main doors, believed to be the 1900s originals have been slowly deteriorating for years and had simply got to the point where they were beyond repair.

“Like cultural venues all over the county, the pandemic has hit us hard financially and we simply did not have the funds to replace the doors ourselves.”

He added: “Marcus and his team have done an amazing job of replicating the original style of the doors. They look fantastic and, if they weren’t so smart now, you’d never know they’d been replaced.

“They even re-fitted the original letter box and fittings to keep them as near to the original style as possible, and we have now begun to introduce a fresh new colour across all our external doors as a result.

“The Grand Pavilion charity would like to say a huge thank you to the Gulliver’s team for their hard work and generosity.”