CAMPAIGNERS are trying to stop the £50m restaurant and cinema complex that will be built next to Bournemouth’s Pavilion.

The Green Party has launched an online petition and will lobby the town’s MPs over the plan, which now has planning permission.

They said it would destroy an area of green space, take trade away from the existing shops and ruin the current view of the Pavilion.

“Do people want another Imax?” said Ryan Cleminson, 30, the press officer for South East Dorset Greens.

The cinema scheme is called Nautilus and features a 357-space underground car park and a spiralling tower in a green colour.

Work is due to start in the early autumn and the developer says it will create 300 jobs with a nine-screen Odeon and a dozen restaurants.

The development will be built over a car park that still has a tree screen and patches of natural ground from its days as part of Pine Walk.

Mr Cleminson said: “This is listed land under the 1983 national heritage act – the council admit that.

“This is the wrong place to build it. I don’t know where, but not here – it’s out of character. We don’t need any more concrete by the seafront.”

Party vice chair Sandra Hale, 46, from Parkstone, said her family moved when she was a child partly as a result of visiting the Pavilion.

She said: “You see this lovely building and all the beautiful greenery and you thought how refreshing it was compared to in London.

“How much open space do we want to lose?”

The scheme is being developed by the Trevor Osborne group. The company planned to build a casino but changed course after opposition.

Cllr David Kelsey, the council’s chair of planning, said: “The Trevor Osborne Property Group development at the Pavilion was subject to the council’s normal planning process in which residents, businesses and groups were given ample opportunity to make representation. “During this period no representation was made by the Green Party.”