Roller skating swept Britain in the years before the First World War, and for a few short summers, Portrush had one of the finest rinks in the country to show for it.
A rink built for a craze
The Portrush Winter Gardens Company Ltd formed in March 1909 with 43 shareholders — including several Urban District Council members and the manager of the Northern Counties Hotel — to build a skating rink and amusement hall in the Pleasure Grounds, on land leased from the railway company at a peppercorn rent of £5 a year. Belfast contractor D. Anderson & Sons built the Pavilion: 250 feet long, 90 feet wide, 25 feet high, with a pagoda-style bandstand, six shops, refreshment facilities, cloakrooms, and 20,000 square feet of maple wood flooring — enough for around 2,000 skaters — at a final cost of £3,539.
It opened on Thursday 1 July 1909, running three sessions a day, and was reported glowingly in the Coleraine Chronicle under the headline “Rinkers and Spectators at Portrush,” praising both the facility and its manager, Mr Ritson, and noting visitors arriving from across the UK specifically to skate. By season’s end the rink was judged one of the best in the British Isles and financially healthy — an £835 balance after depreciation, enough for the company to propose a 12.5% dividend.
A short, bright season
A Fancy Dress Skating Carnival followed on 27 July 1909, and the rink even opened over Christmas that year with a further carnival on 27 December — genuinely unusual for a seaside attraction more associated with summer trade. Period advertisements survive for both events, alongside job postings for staff and skating-fashion ads aimed at ladies keen to look the part. Over that first winter a shooting gallery was added and a cinematograph licence obtained; by 1911 the rink had added dancing nights too, drawing 600 people the first night and 800 the second.
The fashion moves on
The rink ran successfully through two more seasons, but by 1912 it was opening later in the year, with part of the floor already converted over to dancing as skating’s popularity began to fade. A 1913 renovation went further, rebuilding the site into a separate cinema, ballroom and variety theatre with 1,000 seats across all three halls combined — the rink itself removed for winter, “the craze for skating” judged over.
The war ends it
The outbreak of war in 1914 hit visitor numbers immediately, and by 1916 wartime shortages and inflation had made the business unsustainable. The Pavilion went up for sale and sold within two weeks for £1,755; a brief revival attempt under the name “The Pavilion (Portrush)” failed, and the Winter Gardens Company was formally wound up by February 1918. The building was demolished the following April, and the site sat largely unused for nearly a decade — until January 1927, when Ernest Barry won a lease on the same Pleasure Grounds and began what’s now Barry’s Amusements. Portrush’s brief roller-skating craze, in other words, is the direct reason Barry’s stands where it does today.
Sources
Sourced from “Portrush Winter Gardens Company Ltd: 1909-1916” by Frances Wilson, published in Discover Portrush Magazine.