External Demolition – Part 2

The next part being demolished is the south wing of the building between the car-park and the main auditorium wall. This area contained the toilets, front of house staff room, small paint room and lighting stores as well as the female toilets for the dress circle and the dressing rooms for the Circle Studio theatre on the first floor.

Within this area all the pieces of structure that tie it into the main building have already been carefully separated prior to the mechanical claw getting started.

It is hard to appreciate from photographs and video just how massive the demolition machine is, and it is with great expertise that the operator manages to carefully tease the building apart. As it is taken down he separates the materials out into sandstone, brick, wood and metal; some to be reclaimed and used on the project and the rest packed up in different skips and sent away for recycling.

Video of demolition claw

This section of the Citizens has always been a bit of a hotch-potch of different bits of buildings that used to be sandwiched between the Citizens Theatre and the Palace Theatre. Some of the storage areas in the Citizens historically sat inside the Palace Theatre and the south wall of the lean-to bit of building facing into the car-park used to be one of the main walls of the Palace auditorium.

The Citizens Theatre used to sit in behind a shared frontage with the Palace Theatre next door, tucked in behind the rows of tenement flats on Gorbals Street.

On the top-left of the previous image you can make out the peak of the south gable wall of the Citizens Theatre sticking out above the derelict tenements. To the right of it is what used to be the Palace Theatre. In front are the columns and statues of the shared frontage between the tenements. The south-wing being demolished is a mixture of ramshackle buildings that were sandwiched between the two theatres.

In 1973 a fire broke out in the Close Theatre, a small studio theatre that was situated on the first floor behind columns at the front of the building. In 1977 the Close Theatre and Palace Theatre were demolished and any left over bits of them subsumed into the Citizens Theatre building.

South wing roof stripped back

The lean-to roof over the south wing was built as part of the 1989 scheme when the front of house was redeveloped. It would certainly have tidied it up and dealt with with a lot of the issues with the roofs failing in that area but left a lot of redundant space captured inside it. This modern roof structure needed to be taken apart by hand before the rest of this area could be demolished, but this also reveals the original historic roofs below.

This image is looking on to the western end of this section of the south wing. . Top left in white are the dressing rooms for the Circle Studio Theatre. The grey ceiling above it used to be its external roof.

Just beyond it where the wall has started to be opened up was a just a void space between the 1989 roof and the roof of the toilets and switch-room on the ground floor. On the bottom right is a door that led to a long thin room Citizens used to use as a store for the bar.

If you look at the plan at the top of the post you can see that long thin bar store and then beyond it another long thin room that used to contain electrics for the stage lighting. Both these spaces used to be corridors within the Palace Theatre that ran alongside their stalls auditorium. Above them on the first floor is another full length corridor that used to run alongside the Palace dress circle which has never been accessible from within the Citizens. (Except by the brave few that went up through a hatch in the electrical switchroom and hauled themselves through a small hole in the roof where some services had been knocked through). That corridor and parts of a one of the Palace toilets were boxed into the Citizens after the demolition next door.

With the 1989 roof removed you can start to get a sense of the historic roof structures below and the amount of redundant space contained within that bit of the building.

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In these images the 1989 roof has been removed. Just the remnants of the overhang from it can be seen on the left of each picture. You can see the Citizens auditorium wall on the right of each image. On the last image the flat area of felted roof in the middle of the image is the historic roof above the enclosed first floor corridor of the Palace. The wall to the left is what used to be the side wall of the Palace Theatre auditorium.

Demolition South Wing

With the 1989 roof the demolition of the south wing can continue with the rest of the building pulled south into the carpark.

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As the yellow brick wall from the 1989 development came away it revealed some of the original brickwork that would have been Palace Theatre side of the wall. You can see where the openings have been bricked up that would have led into their main auditorium and stagehouse.

With the south wing demolished the Citizens Theatre auditorium and stagehouse walls have been revealed for the first time in over a century. On the left you can see the red and black on the wall is from the corridor in front of house that used to lead to the ladies toilets finishing with the door through to the auditorium.

Just above this is what appears to be an original window that has been sealed up behind a partition wall in the Dress Circle ladies toilets. To the right of that is another window around the position of the fly floor on stage that probably contained a window at some point as well. It’ll be interesting to see what else is revealed as we start to unpick the building.

The next steps are to deal with all of the debris, make sure the remaining building is still wind and watertight, and do more internal work to enable the front of the building to come down.