Fire Station Clifton Road

Another of the Front-line Services, to be considered, now - following on from previous policing theme - as the building seen here was once the Kirkley fire station. The single appliance kept inside was manned by local Retained Firefighters, who worked in a “normal job” (to use a convenient term) and who carried a pocket alerter to inform them of an emergency. They then had about five minutes to get to the station and proceed from there to whatever they had to deal with, be it fire, road accident or whatever else had occurred. Initial training in the Service was (and is) followed by a weekly drill-night on station and periodic refresher courses in different aspects of relevant life-saving techniques.
 

There isn’t time, here, to go into the re-organisation of fire services in Lowestoft and closure of the Kirkley station, but to turn to current use of the redundant building. C.A.P.P.A. stands for Collaborative Associates of Performing Arts and the words below are even more specific, telling us that this is a theatre school run by the late Kenny Cantor and his family, who have been involved in encouraging and supporting performance of varying kinds in the Lowestoft-Beccles area for over forty years.

They stand in a long and proud tradition of local stage activity, which can be traced back to the year 1795, when the Fisher Company of Comedians converted a fish-house (for curing red herrings) on the south side of Blue Anchor Lane - now, Duke’s Head Street - into a theatre. This family of actors later went on to create a chain of theatres located in the market towns of Norfolk and Suffolk, in which a cyclical season of entertainment was put on for the inhabitants of a particular area.

Lowestoft and Wells-next-the Sea got the first two of such buildings in 1812, followed by Halesworth in the same year, then by Woodbridge (1814), Eye (1815), East Dereham (1816), Sudbury (1817), Thetford (1818), Beccles (1819), Swaffham (1822), Newmarket (1825), and Bungay & North Walsham (both 1828). The Lowestoft building is still partly with us (long known as Crown Street Hall and having featured in last year’s Advent Series) - but it ceased to function as a theatre in about 1855, when it was demolished to six feet above ground level and rebuilt as an Assembly Rooms. Having served as a community space for many years, more recently, it has now been converted into two flats.