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It’s my first visit to London’s newest theatre, and the press officer says she wants to hang about for a bit: ‘just until I see the look on your face when you see the auditorium for the first time’.
I immediately start worrying that I’ll offend everyone by not looking impressed enough, but it’s all good: my jaw duly thuds to the floor when I step into the main house of Soho Theatre Walthamstow.
The ‘original’ Soho Theatre on Dean Street in central London is a truly wonderful comedy, cabaret and theatre venue, but the building is not what you’d call architecturally noteworthy. Soho Theatre Walthamstow is a different matter entirely.
It has a long and complicated history, but the short version is that it opened in 1930 as The Granada, a 2,700-seat cinema on busy Hoe Street. It eventually fell into disrepair. Now it’s been born again as a 1,000-seat comedy and theatre venue. And it looks incredible.
While the exterior has been given a clean, white, unobtrusive paint job that brings it somewhat in line with the Dean Street venue, the inside is like stepping back in time – a ravishing art deco masterpiece so instantly iconic that I feel a twinge of frustration that it’s just been sitting here unused for decades.
The slide into dereliction
The original Granada cinema was a special place: built by prolific London theatre architect Cecil Masey and with interiors by the great stage designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, it was beloved by noted Leytonstone resident Alfred Hitchcock. But screens that size were not built to last beyond the golden age of cinema, especially in suburban east London. By the ’60s it had diversified to accommodate gigs – the likes of The Beatles, Buddy Holly and Jerry Lee Lewis played there.
While films were still shown right through the ’80s and ’90s, the writing was on the wall, even with the capacity greatly reduced. The Granada closed as a cinema in 2003 and was purchased by international evangelical organisation the Universal Church of the Kingdom of God, which intended to convert it into a church. Crucially, however, it didn’t have permission to do so.
Many local residents were up in arms about the loss of the Granada as a cultural space. However, the UCKG had deep pockets and was in no hurry: the building was allowed to fall into ruin while the church waited for permission to be granted. After all, who else was going to take on the massive Grade II* listed building?
The campaign to save it
But the grassroots campaign to keep the building working as an entertainment venue found its knight in shining armour some 15 years ago in the form of then-recent transplant to the borough Mark Godfrey, the boss of Soho Theatre. He proposed turning the building into the big sister of the Dean Street venue (whose main room has a capacity of just 150). The process of securing permission was a gruelling one, and involved persuading local authorities that it was a viable business idea.
‘I was literally subjected to a hostile cross examination,’ Godfrey says. ‘I’d provided the names of 100 comedians who could play a 1,000-seat theatre and there was a barrister picking people off the list and saying: really?’. Eventually the proposal was accepted, though the journey to opening has been long. ‘When we first moved in there were pigeons living in the auditorium and a massive pool of water at the front,’ says Godfrey.
It’s pretty close to stepping back in time 95 years
The restoration process has taken years. Godfrey tells me that the technical term for the finished state of the building is ‘arrested decay’ rather than full restoration – because it’s not been reset to 1930, but incorporates some of the updates made over the years. The auditorium has been partitioned off and the back of it turned into a bar – the huge original capacity was clearly not viable.
There have been some discrete but fairly major additions, most notably a flytower. But from a punter’s perspective, it’s pretty close to stepping back in time 95 years. The process has been meticulous: because the only available photos of the Granada’s heyday were black and white, paint experts were called in to analyse the pillars to identify what their colour schemes should be: now it’s bedaubed in the same rich browns, greens and reds that punters would have seen almost a century ago.
Finally, here we are. There was a test event for locals with the London Community Gospel Choir last Thursday and a couple of trial comedy gigs over the weekend, and the theatre opens this week with a run of LA physical comedy queen Natalie Palamides’s brilliant one-woman romcom Weer.
But is it really going to work?
To put it bluntly, can a Zone 3 suburb really support a 1,000-seat comedy theatre, with a capacity three times bigger than Dean Street? Soho Walthamstow’s co-chair is local lad Alessandro Babalola, who remembers seeing films at the Granada as a child in the ’90s. He points out that east London has historically been beloved by artists and creatives as a place to live, but has been poorly served by actual cultural venues.
‘There’s always been a lot of creative people and creative energy in the borough,’ he says. ‘But there hasn’t really been fantastic cultural infrastructure until now, so that is a part of it.’
Godfrey meanwhile is keen to point out that it’s hardly in the middle of nowhere: ‘Walthamstow is 20 minutes from Oxford Circus, and the theatre is a three or four-minute walk from Walthamstow station. So it’s very, very accessible. We want to get a London-wide audience as well as a local audience.’
Like the Dean Street location, the idea is that it’ll be a fun place you’ll want to stick around: it has a 2am licence, acres of bar space, and a first-floor restaurant is due to open at some nebulous point (they haven’t actually decided what type of food it’ll involve yet, although Godfrey muses he might expand on the Indian street food offering at Dean Street).
But above all, there’s the building itself. It only took one peek inside to make me a believer – simply because having seen it I want this space to succeed at all costs. A few Soho-y flourishes have been added to the interior – notably the neon sign and giant disco ball in the huge, marble foyer-slash-bar – but Soho Theatre Walthamstow is its own place, a London architectural jewel bigger than the Soho Theatre brand (it almost reopened under its original name of the Granada, but it was decided that felt a bit anonymous). Perhaps one way of viewing it is as a magnificent endangered creature that Soho has now pledged itself to protect.
This is a London architectural jewel bigger than the Soho Theatre brand
If it’s not a brilliant time for arts funding, we are living in an era where London has been blessed with a lot of new theatres: in the last few years @sohoplace, Sadler’s Wells East and the Lightroom have all opened up.
A cynic might point out that these are all long gestating projects initiated in happier times. But all the better they come to fruition now, and to me, Soho Theatre Walthamstow feels like it has the potential to be the best of the group – a ‘new’ venue that’s also an important part of London’s history.
‘People need arts,’ says Babalola. ‘They need to sit together in the theatre and enjoy and connect with people over a joke or a storyline or a great melody or whatever it is. All of these new venues – we really need them, they’re helping to bring that invigoration to the human spirit.’
Soho Theatre Walthamstow opens Friday May 2.