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The dome on the top of Fort Regent in St Helier could soon be Jersey’s newest listed building.
It’s being considered for the protected status, following a push from the island’s Association of Architects.
They say though many structures put up in the 1970s weren’t neccessarily the prettiest, they are historically important.
The Fort itself has been around since Georgian times, but its conversion to a leisure centre with the addition of a dome only happened in the 1970s.
Carlo Riva from the Association of Jersey Architects said, “I think that the poetry shall we say that tried to create this form here was trying to pick up the maritime feel, the waveforms, and then the dome if you notice is picked up on an axis from the East to West, so you can see the dome dominate, and that architecturally speaks volumes that does.”
When it was built, it was the widest dome in Europe, covered in felt and bitumen.
These days its 58 metres span is now nothing compared to the some of the world’s super-domes.
There’s the 109 metres of the Belgrade Fair Hall in Serbia. The 275 metres of the Cowboys Stadium in Texas. And even that’s about to be over-shadowed by what will be the biggest domed roof on the planet – all 310 metres of the new National Stadium in Singapore.
So no longer a world-beater in the grand scheme of things, but still something Jersey’s architects think deserves protecting for the future.