BATS building marks 100 years

BATS building marks 100 years

A number of Mount Victoria landmarks celebrate their centenaries this year.

First off the blocks is the BATS building, the home of theatre at number 1 Kent Terrace, which opened in March 1924.

It was built for the Manchester Unity Oddfellows Society, a ‘benevolent fraternal organisation’ that spread from its origins in the UK and became a world-wide institution – particularly in the 19th century.

In 1923 Frederick de Jersey Clere and his son Herbert were commissioned to design a building with a purpose-built lodge meeting room on the first floor, and two shops and a dance hall/theatre venue on the ground floor. The elegant three-storey building has a beautiful stained-glass dome in the top floor.

In the 1930s, part of the building was used as a dance hall (one of two popular and well-known dance halls in Mt Victoria). Wellington City Council had problems BATS building marks 100 years with the surreptitious “consumption of intoxicating liquor” in or around some dance halls in that decade but the Oddfellows was consistently “quite orderly” or “quiet” within the hall.

It’s been a theatrical venue ever since it was built and theatre groups who have used it include the Wellington Savage Club (a men’s social and artistic club) from the 1930s, Unity Theatre from the 1940s until 1978, and BATS (which stood for Bane and Austin Touring Society) theatre from 1979 till 1988. Still BATS, but under a different guise, it’s now home to diverse independent theatre productions.

In 2011 the Royal Antediluvian Order of the Buffaloes sold the building to Peter Jackson and Fran Walsh and they issued a long-term lease to BATS.

On the edge of Mount Victoria, the building is also part of a theatre precinct (with Downstage and The Embassy) and sits alongside other 1920s and ‘30s buildings such as the Taj Mahal and the fire station, though it’s a very different style and harks back to the classical.