Welcome Club

This building known as the ‘Ruskin Rooms’ was provide by local philanthropist Richard Harding Watt and was constructed in ‘the Mediterranean Style’ to the designs of Walter Aston.

The building’s original purpose was to provide reading and recreation rooms but over the years it has been used for several different purposes including being a fire station. More recently the building has been used as offices.

At the end of April 1944 General George S. Paton opened the ‘Welcome Cluib’ for the use of Officers of the American Third Army ahead of their participation in the Liberation of Europe commencing with the ‘D-Day Landing’ on 6th June 1944.

Richard Watt admired John Ruskin, the English writer, art critic, philosopher and polymath and it is for this reason that buildings named the Ruskin Rooms.