De La Warr Pavilion

When socialist aristocrat Herbrand Sackville became mayor of sleepy Bexhill in 1932, he persuaded the town to hold Britain’s first architectural competition explicitly requesting modernist design. The result, a steel and concrete ‘People’s Palace’ by a German refugee and a Russian-born architect who’d settled in Britain as a child, sparked such outrage that the 9th Earl turned down the Freedom of the Borough in 1936. Yet this welded steel-frame pioneer went on to inspire the Festival of Britain and the Arts Council, proving that sometimes the most controversial ideas become the blueprint for the future.

George Bernard Shaw, hearing of the opening, wrote that Bexhill had finally emerged from barbarism, though he withheld a clean bill of health until his plays were performed there annually. They obliged within the year. The building spent the following decades in the kind of managed decline common to seaside follies, patched and neglected by turns, until an £8 million restoration reopened it in 2005 as a contemporary arts centre. Sackville got his people’s palace built. It just took seventy years for the people to agree with him.