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Top: Highfield Lodge as shown on the OS map of 1873 (surveyed in 1869)
Bottom: the Club in 1954
Top: Highfield Lodge in approx 1875 (photo by William Savage, courtesy of Winchester Museums Service).
Bottom: aerial view of the Club (approx 1960s)
History of the Club |
The Winchester Working Mens' Association was founded in the early 1900s in Upper High Street. It is undoubtedly the forerunner of the Winchester Conservative Club but little is known of its history. The present Club was opened and registered in Jewry Street in 1910 and the members held their first Annual General Meeting in February 1911.
The Club prospered and in 1936 Highfield Lodge was purchased at a cost of £3000, the same year that the Cattle Market opened.
Highfield Lodge was built in the 1830s as one of a pair of almost identical houses set in their own large grounds on the edge of the City. (The other is Hyde Lodge which also survives and is in the ownership of the City Council.) Highfield Lodge survives largely intact, although it has been extended twice, once in 1911, sympathetically, and again in the 1960s with a flat-roofed addition (the Churchill Room). It was identified as being of interest on the Provisional List of Buildings of Special Architectural and Historic Interest for the City but was omitted from the Statutory List of 1974.
The area previously used as the tennis court was sold to the Council in 1962 as an extension to the Cattle Market.
In November 2006 the name of the then 'Winchester Conservative Club' was changed to 'The Winchester Club'.