Impressive?
Yes - but for all

the wrong reasons
It sparkles in the sun like a stately iceberg.
It tempts the palate like a beautiful iced confection.
This is what Boston Borough Council would have us believe at any rate, with these two pictures* on the right of the town’s Assembly Rooms.
One appears on the borough website, and the other in the latest edition of the council’s bulletin – which is exhorting us to consider hiring the Assembly Rooms which “rank alongside some of the town’s most historic buildings and, although
one of the grandest, is said to be a best-kept secret.”
Even to an untrained eye, the photographs bear a patina of age – quite obviously taken in better days.
According to the borough, the Grade II* listed building: “still impresses with its typically Regency façade.”
The building - completed in 1822 and possibly built by Jeptha Pacey based on earlier designs by William Atkinson - was altered in the 19th century and again in the 1960s after it was gutted by a major fire. The hipped copper roof is 20th century.
The seven bay front would look quite splendid were it not for the fact that some bays have been replaced with nasty modern shop fronts.
So it’s a bit of a hodgepodge, really.
On Monday, we reported that Boston Borough Council was planning to give grant money to shop owners in and around the Market Place to improve premises that have been “insensitively altered and developed.”
Some, the council told, us “are in disrepair, or have been neglected and are underused.”
What a classic example of the pot calling the kettle black.
Far from being the town’s best kept secret, the Assembly Rooms are the town’s most blatant eyesore – as our photographs show.
Look at this picture* of the façade. It’s certainly impressive. Seldom have we seen a public building in such a disgraceful state.

Note the peeling paint, the foliage growing around the balcony area. Who would hire this for their wedding? Imagine the shame as your guests arrive to a welcome of hanging banners promoting a blood donor session and Boston College’s Open night – and enter through a door where the empty shop next door has a crudely made “to let” sign stuck in the window. 
They say that what you can’t see can’t hurt you – but even so – look at the back of the Assembly Rooms – which dominates the view from the White Hart Hotel*. Again, peeling plaster and foliage growing from the walls.

Think Machu Picchu circa 1911 when Hiram Bingham first rediscovered it, and you’ll get the idea.
The interior photos used by the borough to illustrate how good the rooms can look for a wedding reception are fine.
But they don’t tell the story of the dismal approach, the smell of damp that greets you on arrival, and the perilous slope on the staircase that threatens to pitch you head over heels if you’re not careful. And the lift that seems more appropriate to a warehouse.
If you attend the venue when it’s used for exhibitions you need to tread carefully, as the unsuitability of the layout usually creates a maze of narrow corridors which make it hard to see anything much at all.
Boston should be ashamed of the Assembly Rooms in their present state.
If nothing else, money should be found for an emergency repainting programme.
The rooms feature in countless visitors’ photographs – think of the view from the bridge towards the Stump with Bateman’s Britannia pub in the middle ground, which must have been taken tens of thousands of times.
Is the present image the one we want visitors to take home with them?

You can write to us at boston.eye@googlemail.com  Your e-mails will be treated in confidence and published anonymously if requested.

* Click on all photographs to enlarge them