Venue: Kursaal (amusement park)
Town: Southend-on-Sea, GB

The Kursaal is a former amusement park and a Grade II listed building in Southend-on-Sea, Essex, England. The building, originally known as the Kursaal Palace was opened in 1901 as part of one of the world's first purpose-built amusement parks. The venue is noted for the main building with distinctive dome, designed by George Campbell Sherrin, which featured on a Royal Mail special stamp in 2011. The amusement park was home to Southend United F.C. between 1919 and 1934, and during this time also hosted greyhound racing. The majority of the park was closed in 1973, with the rest of the site closing in 1986. The building remained derelict until it was redeveloped in the late 1990s, opening again in 1998. Since 2020, the building again remains empty except for a small Tesco convenience store. The Kursaal site was opened in 1894 by Henry Austen on fifteen acres of land leased from solicitor Alfred Tollhurst and his son Bernard Wiltshire Tollhurst, as the Marine Park and Gardens. The park was designed by Henry Ernest Milner, consisted of gardens, with a bandstand, a 15,000 sq. foot sprung dance floor and a two-acre lake. Four acres of the site was enclosed by a cycle track, where football and cricket was played. Austen proposed to open a pavilion in the park to sell alcohol, but this was objected to by the Women's Temperance Movement, and the Tollhursts were so incensed by this that they announced that they would sell the site for housing. In 1896, Pyramidical Syndicate Ltd purchased the site from the Tollhurst family, but with plans to expand the site as an amusement park, with a separate company, the Pyramidical Railway Company, running a new tower railway ride on the site, designed by William Darker Pitt. However, by 1897 a new venture had taken on the site, Tower and Marine Park Company, but not long after the business was incorporated as the Margate and Southend Kursaals Ltd to raise £175,000 to further develop the site, including plans for a structure in the style