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NOW...LIVE FROM SHOREDITCH TOWN HALL
20.12.2011 / Theatre / 0 Comments
Simon Tait talks to the new director of the East End’s newest and most surprising arts venue
There are stifled screams coming along the corridor from the Committee Room. There are barked orders, and the black-suited, black-tied Minister or Cultural Integrity emerges, adjusting his cuffs and clacking his heels, on the floor as he marches to his next appointment.
The scream is from a startled member of the peripatetic audience, the Minister is an actor, and this is a scene from The New World Order, Hydrocracker’s reworking of Harold Pinter’s short pieces into an Orwellian promenade piece, a Barbican co-production with Shoreditch Town Hall, the venue.
The month’s run, which finished on December 11, was a sell-out, and Nick Giles’s signpost to the future of what had once been the town hall of town halls. He became its director in October and still can’t believe his good fortune. “It is the most extraordinary place, every room is a space with its own character” he says, “and there’s always another one through the next door...”
Its story starts 145 years ago with the Shoreditch Vestry, the model for local authorities as they were defined in the 1899 Act. It was a parish council which accrued more power, responsibility and national reputation as the
parish became a borough. At its height it felt it needed a town hall to
match its importance, a mixture of debating chamber and public assembly hall, the masterpiece of an otherwise obscure local archiect, Caesar Augustus Long. He surpassed even his imperious name to create a municipal palace, opened in 1866, in which no expense was spared. The finest quality decora- tions were used, parquet decking, precise cornicing, cascading chandeliers, mosaic hall floors.
Everywhere there seems to be the motto “More Light, More Power”, testament to this being the first town hall to be lit by electricity, generated by burning recycled rubbish in Shoreditch’s own Borough Refuse Destructor and Generating Station. That is now home to Circus Space. Outside on the ornate façade a statue looks boldly to the horizon above the legend “Progress”.
Then Shoreditch Town Hall fell on hard times, as many town halls did after the 1958 Local Government Act, with the borough subsumed by Hackney. It found a new role as a boxing venue and for 20 years it was London’s answer to Madison Square Garden where East End heroes like Terry Downes won world recognition. But on March 11, 1969, another British champion, Joe Bugner, fought a Trinidadian heavyweight, Ulric Regis, who later died of brain injuries, and public fights were banned in Hackney.
The once magnificent building went into a steep decline, and by 1998 it was on English Heritage’s Buildings at Risk Register. But the town hall was as much a member of the tight-knit Shoreditch community as anyone, and a local ad- hoc pressure group persuaded the council not to dispose of it. As it was, it became a burden the authority couldn’t afford and it was signed over on a long lease to the group, which became the Shoreditch Town Hall Trust. Its chairman Jean Locker, one of the original pressure group, has a photograph of herself as a baby in the 1950s having her birth registered in the building.
It has taken them seven years of fundraising and hard work to restore the building at a cost of £3.5m, but it is a glorious invocation of Victorian architectural pride which is beginning to be known about. The assembly hall could be a music hall or a church, and has been both as well as the venue for Elton John’s bithday party. The council chamber beneath is being readied for a week-long promotion by Google. In the basement nothing has changed for 80 years, and it has become a favourite venue for raves and for art exhibitions, the structural quality and the restoration having ensured there is no damp. In another part of the cellar, the chairs that were used for that last melancholy bout are stacked as they were more than 40 years ago, in a bone-dry space with beautiful ceiling mouldings and marble fire- places. On the ground floor, female visitors love the genteel propriety of the ladies’ loo with its individual dressing tables.
Having preserved the building’s past for the present, the
trust has turned its attention to the future by appointing 39- year-old Nick Giles to run it. His background is in theatre, such as the Oxford Playhouse and more recently the Donmar, but also in venues like the Riverside Studios and the Dome in Newbury, where he programmed new theatre and comedy and brought new life to Greenham Common’s former US airfield.
That background is his blueprint for Shoreditch. This Old Street end of Hackney has become home to a bewildering array of arts projects and galleries. Only yards from the City, since the 90s it has been providing homes for the wealthy as well as for newcomers ro overseas and the traditional inhabitants. “This building is used 25% of the time, but there is so much happening outside our door that we could be supporting and nurturing, and all those exciting bigger projects like Hightide and Paines Plough that need creative space in which to develop work. A lot of work high quality can be supported here, but it also needs to be a community resource with companies based who will work in the neighbourhood too.
“This place is a destination that just isn’t on the map at the moment.”
Giles’s predecessor, Sheila Benjamin, left a good business plan for the unsubsidised venue and it has a turnover of £500,000 a year, but he is launching an appeal in the new year or £1.3m to move it on. His priority is to improve the acoustic – there is still the inevitable corporation echo, and he is a musician by training who wants more music - and to
find a tenant for the restaurant/bar which he sees as the heart of the activity, a meeting place for those in and out of the building.
“People should be able to come and use social spaces here, which at the moment they can’t, and we want to work with a lot of emerging artists” he says. “What people are crying out for is no-strings-attached space where they can make work, and go have an environment where they can meet people and get help if they need it.
“If I’m to be a success in three years’ time this will be a place you couldn’t walk past, you’d have to come in. It’s a great gift to be given - something I’ve never had before was space, and Shoreditch Town Hall is 4,200 square metres of wonderful space.”
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