Derby Live has made it into Private Eye! A work colleague showed me the copy. Derby is the butt of a big joke in an article headed “Derby Donkeys” in which Derby Live is slammed as a an un-coordinated mish-mash of ill conceived cultural events.

I hold out little hope for the Hippodrome, the demolition of which will a shameful indictment of our city council and of Derby. Every city in the UK has a Hippodrome style theatre, most of which were predicted to fail due to lack of support; all have proved a high level of success. You can’t just build one of these theatres, you either have one or you don’t, now Derby is likely to lose its Hippodrome so will be the only city in the UK without such a theatre,

Derby has a conference hall (the Assembly Rooms), a small but attractive converted Town Hall, a modern but unused Playhouse and a huge grey skip on top of a shopping centre, which serves as a multiplex cinema.

Cathedral Green will end up as an unofficial skateboard park, not the Minack style theatre that the council appears to believe they are creating.
Derby is slipping behind the rest of the UK and the politicians are doing nothing useful to prevent it – no amount of shops offices and flats will be a substitute for theatre and the performing arts.

I would say that from Crompon Street, the damage looks pretty well terminal. However a more detailed examintion of the whole building shows that the Macklin Street side and most of the auditorium are intact. It will take some serious rebuilding work to restore the upper floors, the Fly Tower and the roof. Having spoken to a building contractor on this matter, I have been assured that there is no danger to the public unless they enter illegally, and most of the restoration would be needed to repair the damage caused over the past 12 to 15 months.

For those who claim Derby is too small for a theatre, including the Playhouse and the Hippodrome, they should ask why we have such a large shopping centre.

The audiences are there, and there is a national revival of drama and variety theatre in theUK, but at the moment we are losing audiences to places like Notingham and Birmingham where there is a great choice of both old and modern theatre venues

The answer is yes. If anyone is interested in preserving our heritage and would like to learn more, May I suggest the following website as a starting point:

http://www.derbyheritageforum.co.uk/

The first edition of this year’s auditions was recorded at the Hackney Empire, an excellent example of an early 20th century Variety Palace. Built in 1901, and from the outset was also equipped to serve as a cinema.

Like so many theatres and cinemas, the Empire was converted into a bingo hall during the 1950s/60s; its owner, Mecca, had the original decorations painted over with their corporate colours, and had the seating removed from the back stalls to make room for a bar.

It is hard to believe, having seen its interior on the show that the Hackney Empire had faced demolition during the late 1970s, when despite being listed, a developer had started to demolish the theatre’s front entrance. According to the Theatres Trust, the developer was forced to carry out a re-build of the demolished parts using original and similar materials.

In 2004, with the help of lottery matched funding, the auditorium and stage areas were restored and the theatre is now one of London’s premiere independent performing arts venues, something that was considered as an unlikely outcome at the time of its restoration.

The Britain’s Got Talent TV show will be using a number of venues, similar to the Hackney Empire, for auditions around the country over the next few months; I doubt that Derby was, or ever will be considered for such events as it does not have an old style a theatre to equal the magnificence of its neighbouring cities’ old style theatres.

Photographs of Derby Hippodrome’s interior, taken just before the end of 2006, show a theatre very similar in all of its aspects to the Hackney Empire. Remember that the pundits and “experts” had assumed that the Empire could never succeed as a theatre, but were proved wrong. I believe Derby, as the only city in England without such a theatre, will be the loser here.

Does it have to be a theatre? I’m sure a creative enough mind could have turned the Hippodrome into a office space, business centre, shopping arcade, the list is endless… hey they could have even turned it into a visual arts and film centre and called it something like the hexagon, triangle or… quad!

Would it have been good enough for a modern theatre building though?