As soon as exhibitions become permanent buildings like those I have mentioned, they quickly look out-of-date Their appeal is in being in the very latest style when they are erected. Decoration, to convey the latest style, even if it is a coating of chromium pseudo-simplicity as at the Glasgow Exhibition of the nineteen-thirties, must predominate. Hence the sad wildernesses of the White City, hence that mysterious area of minor Metroland around the Wembley Stadium where for all I know those concrete temples of Empire may still be standing among thin poplars and railway lines.
Cinemas too have their origin in fairs. They were, in living memory, booths where people paid a few pence to see the phenomenon of moving photographs. The exaggerated language of the huckster, “the most daring, stupendous, thrilling spectacle ever staged in the history of the universe,” applies as much to the architecture of the cinema as it does to the language of the playbills, trailers and advertisements of films in the daily prints. However much the film, so far as producers and directors are concerned, may progress towards an art, the exhibition side is still in the hands of those who have the mentality of the old fairs. There is hardly a cinema in Britain, except for a highbrow exception like The Curzon, which is not architecturally on the outside a showy attempt to be up-to-date. The interiors, whether “atmospheric” and designed to look like the Garden of Allah, a Moorish mosque or Imperial Rome, are designed as an exotic day-dream. That day-dream looks particularly pitiful in daylight when the manager has not yet assumed his boiled shirt. The earliest cinemas to be erected as permanent buildings may still be seen in some suburban and provincial high roads, the words ELECTRIC PALACE done in plaster among baroque twirls reminiscent of the White City, and a little pay box in mahogany protruding out below the colossal entrance arch.They are survivals of the days when the cinema needed to attract people to go in. There is no need for a flashy entrance now, for the cinemas are the chapels of most of our people who feel it a sin not to attend each change of programme. The chief problem is to hold their increasingly sophisticated attention once they are inside. Slap up-to-date decoration may have something to do with that. There seems to me more sense in the comparatively modest façades of the Granada cinemas whose wildly fantastic interior decoration may possibly be changed as different styles come in, to suit another popular mood.
Music-halls come half-way between the cinemas and the theatre. Their origin is older and they are more homely. They started as entertainments in public-houses and they ended as theatres with this single difference, that the bar opened straight into the auditorium as at dear old Collins’s on Islington Green.
Theatres themselves are an older and more respectable form of architecture, Renaissance in origin—it would be absurd to connect them with the theatres of Ancient Greece and Rome since, in this country at any rate, theatres did not exist until after the Reformation. Nor do many of the older ones survive. The round and open wooden theatres of Shakespeare’s time, Wren’s Drury Lane, the magic effects created by de Loutherbourg with real waterfalls at Sadler’s Wells, not all the water in the New River has saved. They were destroyed by either fire or fashion. The most complete survival is the Theatre Royal at Bristol and even that is largely 1800 in date. Mr. John Summerson, that learned and mordantly entertaining writer on architecture, says that very little of their history is known. “The theatres of this country have never been much studied as architecture, though many books have been written on their owners, lessees and managers and the men and women whom their audiences have applauded.” And this is surprising, for when great dramatists were alive and actors like Garrick, whom all the world of intellect knew, the best architects were found to design theatres. James Wyatt and Henry Holland both built Drury Lane theatres, Nash designed the Haymarket, Smirke Covent Garden, Foulston designed Plymouth’s Theatre Royal. All these buildings have been destroyed or altered out of recognition “by successive generations of profit-eager lessees.”
Many fine Victorian theatres survive of which the best is the Theatre Royal at Newcastle (Benjamin Green, architect), almost a Georgian building and mercifully preserved from successive generations of fashion. In London the noblest surviving building—in my opinion more impressive within and without than Covent Garden—is the Royal English Opera House (1892, Thomas Collcutt, architect), now called the Palace Theatre. This is on an irregularly shaped island site. Its main façade on Cambridge Circus is concave and the awkwardness of the corners of such a façade is overcome by graceful octagonal turrets. The dressing rooms are all along the Shaftesbury Avenue side of the building and serve as a buffer against the noise of that main thoroughfare. The building slopes inwards from the auditorium and is
