Category Archives: Fun Palaces (theatres)

Rue Britannia

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Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

Britannia Music Hall, West Bar, Sheffield (1984)

The surviving mid-nineteenth century music halls in the UK can almost be counted on one hand – Wilton’s and the Hoxton Hall in London, the Old Malt Cross and the Talbot (latterly Yates’s Wine Lodge and now Slug & Lettuce) in Nottingham, the City Varieties in Leeds and the Britannia in Glasgow.  Sheffield had a couple of surviving examples until the 1990s, and one of them at least was worth saving.

In the second half of the nineteenth century West Bar, which runs along the valley floor below the hill on which the town centre had grown, was what the journalist Steve McClarence described as “the Shaftesbury Avenue of the Sheffield working man”.  Here stood the Surrey Music Hall, which burnt down spectacularly in 1865, the Bijou (which survived as a tacky cinema into the 1930s), the London Apprentice (demolished in the 1970s) and the Gaiety, of which fragments survived until it was demolished c2000 to clear space for the Inner Ring Road.

The Gaiety in its heyday was owned by Louis Metzger, a pork-butcher.  He kept a musical pig called Lucy who, if plied with beer, would sing – as indeed a pig owned by a pork-butcher might.

The Britannia Music Hall on West Bar stood literally next door to the former police- and fire-station that is now the National Emergency Services Museum.  Built on the back-land behind the older Tankard Tavern, it dated from around the mid-1850s, and was superseded by bigger, better and more central variety theatres in the 1890s.

Incredibly, it survived as a bathroom showroom, intact but altered with a floor built across the proscenium and a lift-shaft at the back of the auditorium, and was described in detail by historian Andrew Woodfield in 1978.  When I first encountered it in 1984 it was Pink Champagne, providing wedding goods and, it appeared, a venue for wedding receptions.

In February 1988, by which time it was operating as Harmony Wedding World, Ian McMillan and the late Martyn Wiley broadcast their BBC Radio Sheffield Saturday-morning show from the Britannia and an actor called Stuart Howson (whose great-grandfather had managed the Regent Theatre in the east end of Sheffield) gave the final performance, a couple of verses of a Victorian ballad, ‘The best of the bunch’.

Later the building became Door World and then, just as Sheffield City Council prepared to put a preservation order on it in 1992, it went up in flames and was quickly demolished.

There was much hand-wringing by the Council, the Hallamshire Historic Buildings Society, the Theatres Trust and the site-owners, West Bar Partnership who (in The Stage, April 4th 1992) “expressed regret”.  The fact remains that conservationists have to win every battle, while the developer only has to win one.

The space where the Britannia stood is now used for car sales.

The loss of the Britannia Music Hall is described and illustrated in Demolished Sheffield, a 112-page full colour A4 publication by Mike Higginbottom.

For details please click here.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Theatrical roots

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Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1985)

Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1985)

Wilton’s Music Hall stands in a corner of London that you’d never imagine is steeped in theatrical history.

Beside the railway viaduct from Fenchurch Street Station is the site of the very first London Theatre, built in 1577 and twenty years later surreptitiously dismantled by William Shakespeare’s company to be re-erected as the Globe Theatre on the Southwark side of the river.

In Leman Street stood Goodman’s Fields Theatre, opened in 1729 and closed in 1742, where David Garrick (1717-1779) made his London debut as Richard III in 1740.  In Wellclose Square, the actor John Palmer (c1742-1798) ill-advisedly built the Royalty Theatre (1787) without a licence:  it became the East London Theatre before it burnt down in 1826.

Nearby in Ensign Street there are a series of innocuous-looking Grade II listed bollards inscribed with the monogram RBT.  This commemorates the Royal Brunswick Theatre which collapsed in February 1828, shortly after the opening night.  Charles Dickens’ account of this disaster can be found at http://anengineersaspect.blogspot.co.uk/2010/05/collapse-of-brunswick-theatre-february.html.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

 

The handsomest hall in town

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Wilton's Music Hall, Grace's Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1995)

Wilton’s Music Hall, Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, London (1995)

At the gym I sit on the exercise-bike, retarding the ageing process and idly watching the music-video channel on the flat-screen TV.  Much of the footage is pretentious twaddle, but it’s entertaining to spot the locations used.  Recently I noticed some dramatically lit, high-powered dancing going on around barley-sugar columns that could only be Wilton’s Music Hall, in Grace’s Alley, Tower Hamlets, built in 1858 behind an earlier pub called the Prince of Denmark, otherwise known as the Old Mahogany Bar.

Like many music halls, Wilton’s auditorium was built on back-land behind an existing pub.  Invisible from the street, it was, and is, entered through the pub frontage in a terrace of five houses.  John Wilton intended his spacious hall to be used purely for variety entertainment:  the proscenium is set high above the auditorium floor and there is no wing-space to speak of.

The helical twist ‘barley-sugar’ columns support the balcony of one of the few surviving pub music-halls of the mid-nineteenth century.  Its bombé-fronted balcony is decorated with papier-mâché gilded leaves and flowers.  The original flat floor was gently raked after a serious fire in 1877, yet it was clearly originally intended for patrons to sit at tables to drink, rather than in seated rows to watch.

Like most such halls it closed shortly after the passing of the Metropolis Management Act of 1878, which tightened the licensing requirements for auditoria, and it became a Wesleyan Mission Hall from 1888 to 1956 and then a rag-warehouse.

It was rescued by the Greater London Council ten years later, and a series of restoration schemes gradually brought it back to life.  Richard Attenborough used it as a location in Chaplin (1992) in a scene where Geraldine Chaplin plays her grandmother, Hannah.

Now it is in the care of the Wilton’s Music Hall Trust, with a varied diet of entertainments and a full diary of private bookings, including music-video shoots.  Their website http://www.wiltons.org.uk includes full details of what’s on and an excellent virtual tour.

Update:  The Ancient Monuments Society Newsletter (Autumn 2012) reports that Wilton’s Music Hall has been awarded a Heritage Lottery Fund grant of £1,641,800.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

 

Everyman

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Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (1978)

Everyman Theatre, Liverpool (2018)

Almost opposite Liverpool’s Catholic Cathedral stands – for a short while longer – an undistinguished building of huge cultural importance.

The former Hope Hall, a nonconformist chapel of 1837, after many transformations, became the Everyman Theatre in 1964.  This was the cockpit of artists, writers and playwrights in the great wave of Liverpool’s prominence that followed the success of the Beatles.

The poets Adrian Henri, Roger McGough and Brian Patten, the playwrights Alan Bleasdale and Willy Russell, and a cluster of actors including Bernard Hill, Anthony Sher, Julie Walters and the late Pete Postlethwaite were associated with the building before and after a further rebuilding in 1975-7.  The premieres of Willy Russell’s John, Paul, George, Ringo…and Bert (1974) and Shirley Valentine (1986) took place at the Everyman Theatre.

The building was also celebrated for its Everyman Bistro, founded in 1970 by Paddy Byrne and Dave Scott in the basement.  Here was as good a buffet as you could find in Liverpool, and a convivial atmosphere without rival.

Now the Everyman is to be replaced by an entirely new building, opening in 2013, and you can watch the process, day by day, at http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/content/Home/AboutUs/NewEveryman/LiveCam.aspx.  Sooner or later, you’ll see the queue for the reopening.

Sarah Horton and Ronnie Hughes’ film tribute to the Everyman Bistro is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EibgxJnWMKU&feature=player_embedded.

The opening season at the new Everyman begins on Saturday March 8th 2014 with Twelfth Night:  http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/show/Twelfth_Night/1031.aspx.

Iron curtain at the Abbeydale

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Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield: auditorium (1987)

While the Adelphi Cinema lay dark Sheffield’s other listed cinema building found a practical use as a performance building.

I’ve a soft spot for the Abbeydale Cinema.  Though I only ever once saw a film there, I repeatedly visited it in the 1980s when it was an office-equipment showroom – an unexpected fate for a superannuated cinema.  The company that bought it, A & F Drake Ltd, sold filing cabinets and office desks in the stalls and balcony, and separately operated the former ballroom and billiard hall in the basement as a snooker club.  The Drakes and their manager, Ian Humphreys, repeatedly allowed me to take adult-education groups to see the place from top to bottom, and on one occasion Ian McMillan and Martyn Wiley broadcast Radio Sheffield’s Saturday morning show live from the Abbeydale auditorium.

Because the Drakes had the imagination to find a productive use for the building – they regarded it as a better customer attraction than an anonymous box on a trading estate – it survived intact long enough to attract the attention of a Friends’ group who are restoring it as a venue for film and amateur dramatics.  Cinemas in the 1920s featured live performance as well as silent movies, and the Abbeydale had an organ – long ago destroyed – and still has a full-scale stage with wings, fly-tower and dressing-rooms.

Even more interesting is the iron safety-curtain, which has remained in situ even after Drakes jacked up the stage-floor six feet to create more space for their wares.  This must date back to the 1920s, but its unique interest is the complete set of painted advertisements that faced audiences between films.  Clifford Shaw, the greatest expert on Sheffield cinemas, has dated the existing adverts to the 1950s.  Ian Humphreys observed to me in the 1980s that all but one of the businesses advertised had by that time folded.  The Cinema Theatre Association reports that, to the best of their knowledge, no other cinema safety-curtain survives with contemporary advertisements, and for this reason is supporting the proposal to upgrade the listing.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

 

The Auditorium

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The Auditorium Building, Chicago

The Auditorium Building, Chicago

It’s easy to walk straight past Chicago’s Auditorium Building (1889) on South Michigan Avenue.  Once the tallest building in the city, it’s now one of the magnificent group of structures that form the “streetwall” overlooking Grant Park.

The philanthropist Ferdinand Wythe Peck (1848-1924), supported by such luminaries as Marshall Field (1834-1906) and George Mortimer Pullman (1831-1897), intended it as a major cultural centre and with a strongly egalitarian emphasis, following the bitter and tragic Haymarket Riot of 1886, which first provoked the celebration of May Day as a workers’ festival.

Peck wanted a civic auditorium that would provide equally good sight-lines and acoustics for every seat and, as originally conceived, no private boxes.  Built at a cost of $3,200,000, it was one of the earliest American buildings to be air-conditioned and lit by incandescent electric lights.

The Chicago architects Louis Sullivan and Dankmar Adler combined in one structure a 4,300-seat auditorium, a speculative office block and a 400-room hotel.  Adler designed a foundation raft of railroad ties (railway sleepers, in British terminology) and steel rails to support the ten-storey structure, with its seventeen-storey tower, on the deep bed of clay beneath.

Unfortunately, the weight of the load-bearing exterior walls led to spectacular settlement, in places over 2½ feet, so that to this day the lobby floor slopes perceptibly.  Nevertheless, Sullivan & Adler’s practice moved into an office suite on the top floor of the tower, where the young Frank Lloyd Wright served his apprenticeship as a draughtsman.

The auditorium is magical:  the ceiling arches are embellished with 24-carat gold leaf and the walls are elaborated stencilled to Sullivan’s designs.  Albert Francis Fleury painted murals of Spring and Autumn on the side walls and Charles Holloway decorated the proscenium with forty-five life-size classical figures, all inspired by Louis Sullivan’s poetry.

The building has provided the venue for many milestones in Chicago’s cultural life:  it hosted the Republican National Convention in 1888, the year before the building was completed;  it was the venue for the debut of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1891.

However, the Symphony Orchestra moved out in 1904 and the opera company followed in 1929.  The office space proved difficult to sell because of the noise of the elevated railway on South Wabash Avenue, and the hotel failed to thrive because newer competitors featured en-suite bathrooms.

The only reason the building survived the 1930s was because it was too expensive to demolish.  In 1941 the theatre company went bankrupt.  During the war it was used as a servicemen’s entertainment centre, with a bowling alley on the stage and front stalls.

In 1947 the Auditorium Building was sold for $1 to the then Roosevelt College, now Roosevelt University.  The hotel rooms became classrooms and the former dining room became the college library.  A group led by Mrs Beatrice T Spachner campaigned for the restoration and reopening of the derelict auditorium, which took place in 1967.  The building was designated a National Historic Landmark in 1975, and a further, thorough restoration took place in 2001.

The Auditorium has a regular programme of performances – http://www.auditoriumtheatre.org/wb/pages/home/performances-events/performances.php – and Roosevelt University offers public tours of the building:  http://auditoriumtheatre.org/wb/pages/home/education/historic-theatre-tours.php.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Windy City:  the architecture of Chicago please click here. 

 

Lost Empire

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Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

Empire Theatre, Garston, Liverpool (2000)

The invaluable newsreel of the current Cinema Theatre Association Bulletin reports that the former Empire Theatre, Garston, in south Liverpool, is threatened with demolition – apparently to make way for a hospital car-park.

That would be a pity.

This modest suburban music hall, with a seating-capacity variously recorded as 876 or 1,040, was built, after several false starts, and opened in 1915.  It lasted as a theatre for barely three years, before becoming a full-time cinema, bravely advertised as “The Scala of the South”, with a local news Gazette and an augmented orchestra.

Ironically, for an enterprise with such shaky financial foundations, it prospered in the absence of any nearby super-cinema in the surrounding suburbs.

It eventually closed as a cinema, with a final double bill of Elvis Presley in Jailhouse Rock and Glenn Ford in The Fastest Guns Alive, on December 8th 1962.  After that it went over to bingo until 2009 – three years of theatre, forty-four years of cinema and forty-seven years of bingo.

When I photographed it in 2000 the auditorium was undivided;  by the following year a suspended ceiling had been inserted between the balcony and the proscenium, presumably to make the place easier to heat.  Nevertheless, the Theatres Trust website http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/1956-empire-garston
reports that the building is well-maintained and retains many original features.

The existing building, by an unrecorded architect, was designed as a full-scale theatre, with a thirty-foot proscenium, a stage fifteen feet deep and a tower of seven dressing rooms, and because neither cinema nor bingo required any substantial alteration, it survives as a virtually intact Edwardian music-hall/variety theatre.

It’s the classic setting for Mickey Rooney’s line, “Let’s do the show right here.”

It’s hard to estimate – because I’m not a Garston resident – whether there’s any community need for a compact auditorium with everything needed to return it to live performance.

It’s a shame if the car-park can’t go somewhere else.

The Cinema Theatre Association website is at http://www.cinema-theatre.org.uk.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s ‘lectures’ Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry and Liverpool’s Heritage please click on the links.

Bringing the house down

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Hippodrome Theatre, Derby (1993)

Hippodrome Theatre, Derby (1993)

The last two articles [Hug the Odeon and Hug another Odeon] have highlighted auditoria that are intact (just), architecturally valuable, unlisted and in danger of demolition.

Listing a building doesn’t, of course, automatically guarantee its security.  The Hippodrome Theatre, Derby is a notorious example of what can happen to a supposedly protected building.

In this case, the owner, Mr Christopher Anthony, under the pretext of making repairs, managed to remove the stage area and much of the roof.  The delicacy with which this was accomplished can be seen at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pS5UOSz2dBg and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5YlUJUyLcMk&feature=related.  This followed an earlier arson attack which, by means which are unclear, destroyed plasterwork around the dress circle and the proscenium arch.

Derby City Council, supported by such organisations as English Heritage, Derby Civic Society, the Theatres Trust and the Cinema Theatre Association, has pursued Mr Anthony through legal action, not only for the damage caused to the previously intact building but also by rejecting his application to turn the site into, of all things, a multi-storey car-park.

Why does this matter?  Leaving aside the civic and legal arguments about the significance and effectiveness of listed-building legislation, the Hippodrome had, and still has, historical and architectural value.  It was built in 1914, right at the end of the great late-Victorian and Edwardian boom in building variety theatres.  It is the only known surviving example of the work of the Scottish architects, Charles T Marshall & William Tweedy.  Though it was adapted as a cinema in 1930, it returned to theatre use from 1950 to 1959;  it operated as a bingo club from 1962 until it abruptly closed in 2007.

As a result of this history it was very little altered.  I took groups to visit it, by courtesy of Walkers Bingo, repeatedly during the 1980s and 1990s.  The auditorium, stage-tower and grid were intact.  At some time in the early 1990s the auditorium was redecorated and the seating reupholstered.

Bingo kept the roof on and the building warm for decades.  There were even occasional Christmas shows on the stage.  Derby is not well blessed with auditoria, and can ill afford to lose this one.

Indeed, the city is rather better provided with multi-storey car-parks.

The rallying-point for those who wish to see the Hippodrome somehow restored is the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, whose website is http://www.derbyhippodrome.co.uk.  The Theatres Trust website has a detailed architectural description: http://www.theatrestrust.org.uk/resources/theatres/show/118-hippodrome-derby.

A detailed options appraisal report from the architectural practice Lathams, with phtconsultants, examines alternative possibilities for restoration:  http://derbyhippodrome.co.uk/resources/Options-Appraisal-Report-17.04.12.pdf.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.

Madeleine moment

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John has provided further details of the Wurlitzer organ at Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire, which, as I mentioned in the previous blog, was bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris in 1937 for Sir Julien Cahn’s private theatre attached to his house.

The organ came, not from the Madeleine Theatre (1924), which still exists in the Rue de Surene [http://www.theatremadeleine.com/index-historique.html], but from another Madeleine Theatre, which is now an opticians, designed entirely as a cinema by Marcel Oudin in 1918, at 14 Boulevard de la Madeleine .  The Wurlitzer – one of only two French Wurlitzers – was installed by the then owners, Loew Inc, in 1926.  According to Ken Roe’s contribution to http://cinematreasures.org/theater/23874/ the cinema subsequently became the Gaumont Madeleine and showed films until at least the mid-1970s.

The website http://www.theatreorgans.com indicates this Wurlitzer was repossessed at some point after installation.  This modest instrument was an ideal purchase for Sir Julien’s 352-seat theatre – “une salle élégante“, as the French account has it.

The knobs and bells and whistles of the Wurlitzer have a more elegant tone when described in French:  les clochettes de traîneau [sleigh bells], les sabots de cheval [horses’ hooves], les vagues [waves], les oiseaux [birdsong], la corne d’auto [car hooter], le gong d’incendie [fire-alarm], le sifflet de bateau à vapeur [steamboat whistle], la sirène [siren], le tam-tam [gong], et la sonnerie de porte [doorbell].

Among his many talents, John is a church organist and confessed, many years ago, to an ambition to play a Wurlitzer like the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.  My influence in Blackpool runs nowhere near that far, but I managed to give him the opportunity to play the Stanford Hall Wurlitzer.

Sometime in the late 1980s I ran a WEA day-visit to country houses in south Nottinghamshire, and smuggled John into the orchestra pit of the Stanford Hall Theatre – then part of the Co-operative College – with an arrangement that when at the end of my tour I brought the group into the back of the auditorium and said, “And this is the private theatre…” John would press the lift-button on the console and rise from the pit playing ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’.

Which would have worked perfectly if John had realised how far up the lift goes, or I’d been aware that he suffers from vertigo.  It’s quite difficult to keep a grip when you’re playing with both hands and both feet.  I suppose buttock-clenching is the only resort and I’ve never liked to ask.

Certainly John’s performance had a certain bravura quality, and we’ve both dined out on the story ever since.

 

Security-minded millionaire

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Sir Julien Cahn (1882-1944), the millionaire owner of the Nottingham Furnishing Company, lived from 1928 until his death at Stanford Hall, near Loughborough, which he transformed to suit his distinctive lifestyle – part English country house, part Hollywood.

He employed Queen Mary’s decorator, White, Allom Ltd, to install pastiche historical interiors and modern Art Deco schemes including at least four bathrooms (Sir Julien’s in black and white, Lady Cahn’s in blue and white, a guest bathroom in tortoiseshell and another – which survives – in salmon pink marble).  He built an indoor badminton court with trellis-work, trompe l’oeil privet and a birdcage in the corner.

Apart from hunting and philanthropy Sir Julien had two major hobbies, cricket and magic, in neither of which – according to contemporary accounts – he particularly excelled, but both of which he took extremely seriously.

To provide a venue for charity performances, Sir Julien commissioned a sumptuous 352-seat private theatre with a Wurlitzer organ bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris.  Above the auditorium Sir Julien provided a wing of bedrooms for the visiting cricket stars who took part in the Sir Julien Cahn Cricket XI.

Below the auditorium is the most extraordinary feature of all – a capacious gas-proof air-raid shelter easily capable of accommodating the entire household, with decontamination facilities and an escape-tunnel extending thirty-six feet beyond the building line in case the entire building collapsed above.

The Cahns left their mark in the grounds too.  There was an open-air swimming-pool, which eventually cost £60,000, nearly as much as the theatre, and for his fifty-fifth birthday Lady Cahn bought her husband some sea-lions (their names were Charlie, Aqua, Freda and Ivy) and a suitable pool was duly constructed.

After Sir Julien’s death in 1944 Stanford Hall became the Co-operative College until 2001.