What is being demolished and why?

Lots of people in Glasgow have a soft spot for the Citizens Theatre despite it being a bit rough round the edges. Indeed, that is probably a large part of its charm. But there’s a point where ‘shabby chic’ tips over into ‘derelict building’.

Although the Citizens Theatre has been putting a brave face on it for years the building has been failing in a whole host of ways for some time. Despite years of roof repairs there are buckets galore when it rains catching water from the plethora of leaks around the building. It regularly rains on stage on unsuspecting actors and lighting equipment. There’s sewage leaking into the sub-stage and backing up beneath the toilets requiring hundreds of thousands of pounds to repair. The wall in the south car-park is falling down and there’s always a risk that the derelict building attached to the historic paint frame will pull this treasure down with it at some point if it collapses.

It is freezing in winter (particularly since the front of house heating system packed up and died beyond repair a couple of years ago), and boiling in the winter. We regularly struggle with people getting faint when it gets too hot and having to don hats and scarfs on the front row of the auditorium during the winter.

A lot of the spaces, particularly backstage, are cramped and inhospitable, with people working out of spaces with no fresh air or natural light. Much of the footprint is taken up with a maze of corridors and stairs that waste space and make navigation difficult. The changes in level all over the place and lack of lifts and other facilities also make the building much less accessible than it should be.

Last but not least, there aren’t enough toilets and the ones that we have are pretty grim (although you should see the one’s backstage which make the ones out the front look fit for royalty).

However, at the heart of the building is the auditorium and stage, still in the original sandstone box in which it was built in 1878. There isn’t another theatre space quite like it. It has some of the grandeur of your typical Victorian Theatre but without feeling like a museum piece or aloof in any way. The stage is big enough to make work that can at times feel pretty epic in scale but the auditorium is designed in such away that everyone is so close to the action that it has a real intimacy; a combination that I’ve seldom experienced anywhere else.

For this reason the auditorium and stage will be pretty much left alone apart from improvements like heating, ventilation and modernising the stage equipment. The idea is to peel back all the layers around the sandstone box that contains them, opening up and rationalising more useful spaces in back-of-house and creating accessible new public spaces containing a foyer, cafe/bar, studio theatre, learning and participation studios, and other facilities fit for today’s audiences.

To achieve this, the south and west wings are to be demolished entirely.

In these areas, pretty much all the services for heating, electrical, water and waste are on their last legs or have already packed up. The north-west contains a ramshackle arrangement of extremely poor quality office accommodation (I remember once, a surveyor looking at them from outside commenting that he thought that bit of the building was vacant and derelict till he spotted the General Manager at her desk through a barred window). The foyers are too cramped and small for our audiences with a poorly positioned bar and no facilities for food. The changes in level make access a challenge. In the South wing the studio spaces are in desperate need of overhaul, uncomfortable, and have had their capacities reduced due to building legislation to the extent that they now aren’t financially viable to run, or theatrically as satisfying to produce work in. The roof, glazing and walls have failed, letting in the rain as well as letting out all the heat; except in summer when you can’t get rid of the heat due to lack of ventilation. The rest of the south wing contains an odd assortment of bits of building at different levels that used to sit between the Citizens Theatre and the Palace Theatre that waste loads of space and makes for difficult awkward spaces to use. It also contains the public toilets, which at risk of repeating myself, are grim – really grim.

The cost and physical challenge of making these spaces fit for purpose and providing the new facilities that are required makes demolition and rebuilding the most practical and cost effective way forward.