Clewer Youth & Community Centre

On 14th August 1890, Sir Henry Daniel Gooch of Clewer Park, and his brother, Daniel Fulthorpe Gooch of Trinity Hall, Cambridge, signed a conveyance whereby they gave a parcel of land approximately one rood and fourteen and a half perches facing onto Parsonage Lane, to be used as a site on which to build a Hall, under the authority of an Act of Parliament entitled “The Literary and Scientific Institutions Act of 1854”.

The land was conveyed to a Committee of Trustees which included Daniel Fulthorpe Gooch, The Rev. Roland Errington, Colonel John Hornby and Frederic Ford, for them to raise the necessary finances by Public Subscription to build a hall for “The Promotion of Science, Literature, the Fine Arts, for Adult Instruction, the Diffusion of Useful Knowledge, ”.

Having title to the land, the Trustees then asked people to subscribe the funds necessary to build the Hall, and by November 1892 the building fund stood at £500 with the estimated cost at £900. Work started in late 1892, and the Architect was a Mr. Bell, who had designed the Albert Institute in Sheet Street. The Hall was completed in October 1893.
It has served the people of Clewer for many years and latterly had been the home of Windsor Boys Clubs. In 1999 the Trustees contracted a lease with the Berkshire Association of Clubs for Young People (BACYP), who successfully obtained funds from the Lottery to enable them carry out a refurbishment of the Hall, and to fund a Hall Manager for three years.