A FAMILY business behind some of the best-known buildings in the area has shared its fascinating collection of pictures.

The Drewitt Group can trace its history to 1877 and spent much of the 20th century working on landmark projects around Bournemouth and Poole.

Current owners Richard and Gillian Drewitt are the fifth generation of their family to run the business, which was one of the best-known builders in the area until 1984.

The company’s story started in 1877, when Charles Henry Drewitt started his own painting and decorating business in New Malden, Surrey.

His son James set up his own business in New Malden in 1898 and came to Bournemouth in 1916, when he was invalided out of the army.

The business flourished and, after the war, James Drewitt took advantage of the government subsidies available for new housing. He bought land at Newstead Road, Southbourne, and claimed to have built the town’s first post-Great War house. His company’s base was part of a site he had bought on Seabourne Road and Darracott Road in Southbourne.

James Drewitt got onto Midland Bank’s list of approved contractors and built the bank’s Winton branch in 1923, followed over the next five years by branches in Charminster, Lower Parkstone and Southbourne Grove.

The company built the post office at Cardigan Road and before long, contracts for local authorities were becoming an ever bigger part of the company’s work, with development sites across the south.

In 1936, the company was hired to demolish Bournemouth’s original Winter Gardens concert hall and build a bowling rink in its place. The new building turned out to have superb acoustics and in 1946, it was itself converted into a concert hall.

Contracts with the government kept the firm busy through World War Two. On James’s death in 1946, the business passed to his son Charles, whose own son Michael joined in 1950.

One of the firm’s biggest post-war contracts was the building of a new bus depot for Bournemouth Corporation. The Mallard Road building, opened in 1953, was 150ft wide – a record-breaking span covered with pre-stressed beams and shell roofing. Although the buses moved out in 2006, the building was listed, and is today occupied by Homebase.

The rebuilding of Beales in Bournemouth, which had been wrecked by bombing in 1943, was another big post-war contract, as was the Pier Theatre.

A host of public projects in the following years included Glenmoor School, a new medical centre at the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority in Winfrith, a marine training centre for the Royal Marines at Hamworthy, the magistrates court and police station in Christchurch and Bournemouth’s magistrates court.

Two of Dorset’s most recognisable factories, Max Factor at Wallisdown and Ryvita on Old Wareham Road, were Drewitt projects, as were famous retail sites including an extension to Bobby’s (now Debenhams) in Bournemouth Square and the town’s Burlington Arcade.

Throughout this time, Drewitt was a major local business, turning over £3m in 1970 and employing 50 people at its head office, with up to 100 times that number on building sites. The head office moved to Ringwood Road, near the current Turbary Retail Park, in the 1950s.

Staff were a community, with sports teams and coach outings, and their children were entertained too. Gillian Drewitt – who remembers being taken to the offices in the school holidays to do photocopying and filing – said: “They used to take the children of employees to the pantomime and there used to be tea for employees at Fortes at Westover Road.”

The building of Bournemouth and Poole College of Art and Design – now the Arts University Bournemouth – in the early 1980s turned out to be the company’s last big construction projects.

Richard Drewitt said: “In the early 1980s, the first big recession came along. A lot of family businesses went to the wall or had to completely change what they were doing. We had to make the decision that if we were going to survive, we had to change.”

He remembers being in the boardroom when three business plans were on the table. The board went for his father Michael’s plan to close down the contracting business.

“It meant letting people go who had worked for the business for many years. It did take its toll on father in terms of health, but a lot of the guys found work with other contractors around the area,” he said.

“The local building community were very supportive in terms of taking on some of those guys because they knew how good they were. We kept in touch with quite a few of them.”

Today, most of the family businesses which once dominated the local construction industry are gone, but the Drewitt name remains. The group consists of a building maintenance arm, a plumbing and heating business and the electrical contractor Drewlec. Richard says he often finds himself refurbishing or maintaining buildings that earlier generations of Drewitts constructed. The yard behind its Ringwood Road offices has become a small industrial estate. Meanwhile, the paperwork and photos in Drewitt House represent a sizeable and fascinating chunk of Dorset’s history.