King Arthur's Great Halls

King Arthur’s Great Halls stands in Fore Street, Tintagel, a granite village on Cornwall’s north coast. The building was added in the early 1930s to an existing house on the site of the old Town Hall and Market Hall. Frederick Thomas Glasscock, who lived nearby in a house he called Eirenikon, designed it as the headquarters of his Fellowship of the Knights of the Round Table of King Arthur. The exterior uses fifty-three different kinds of Cornish stone, giving the walls a patchwork of local hues. Inside, two large halls and a bookshop occupy the ground floor, while upstairs rooms serve the masonic lodges. The halls are worth visiting for their stained glass and paintings of the Arthurian legend. Veronica Whall created seventy-two windows that tell the story of King Arthur and display the knights’ coats of arms and weapons. William Hatherell painted several scenes from Arthur’s life on the walls. The windows form the largest collection of 20th-century Arthurian stained glass and show Arts and Crafts craftsmanship. The building also hosts the annual dinner of the Fellowship on the first Saturday in June. Visitors find two main halls filled with Arthurian art and a shop at the front selling books on the subject. The larger hall contains most of the stained-glass windows and paintings, while the smaller hall is used for masonic meetings. Upstairs, four masonic bodies meet in separate rooms, each with its own history and date of formation. The building’s mix of medieval legend and modern masonic use gives it a distinctive character in the heart of Tintagel.