In April 2011, I had my offer for the former Jarrow Civic Hall accepted by the local authority. After a long wait, the purchase was completed on Friday 15th April 2011.
The Jarrow Civic Hall is directly across the road from my existing business; JK Clothing LTD which gave me more reason to rescue the building from being pulled down. The news was shortly broken to the public by the South Shields Gazette on Monday 18th April.

It is and always will be our intention to bring the ballroom back to its original condition and open it for use to the public for functions such as weddings, live music, dancing and much more. The first stage of the development was to create an Italian restaurant on the ground floor to be used by the local community.

The ballroom veiling ceiling has been fully restored and photos of this can be found in our gallery section. This was done early in the restoration as we all agreed it would be better to finish first as this work would create a lot of dust and debris.
Instead of having a grand opening night, we had a week long celebrations where we showcased all that the Civic has to offer.

The restaurant opened on the 12th December and was named “Sir Charlies’s” after Sir Charles Mark Palmer the famous ship builder who instigated the building of Jarrow Civic back in 1863. The restaurant was and still continues to be well received by the people of Jarrow and surrounding areas. Local people have fond memories of the Civic Hall from its heyday and would have been very disappointed to see it demolished. The comments we have had from those who have used the restaurant have been very positive. See below some very positive reviews of Sir Charlie’s.

The Evening Chronicle Review     –     The Journal Review

On Tuesday 14th February, we had an inspection by the Environmental Health Department of the local authority who awarded the restaurant the maximum of 5 stars.

In March, we opened the grand ballroom of the Jarrow Civic. Throughout 2013, we hosted several weddings, christenings, birthdays and anniversaries. During the course of the year, we hosted over 30 functions.
2014 we hosted over 50 functions and 2015 seen us host well over 60.

Throughout 2016, over 70 functions have been hosted as the great hall gained a reputation for its ability to host any function with great efficiency and at a good value. With the addition of a full time chef and catering facility during 2015, the Civic Hall can take care of the catering for the function with either a full meal or buffet. Buffets being the most popular as the are relatively inexpensive and our reviews on Facebook show them to be good quality and well received by our clients.

The renovation of the former Jarrow Civic Hall is now almost complete although it will never be fully complete as we continue to strive to make improvements to what is already considered to be one of the best venues of its type in the local area.
2017 will see the installation of stage lighting to assist the amateur group who hold their rehearsals at the hall and are set to show a performance of Cinderella in January. The theatre group put on a very successful performance of Peter Pan the musical in 2016