Nicholas Hare Architects was faced with an unusual set of challenges in its refurbishment of UCL鈥檚 Bloomsbury Theatre, which is wrapped around by a variety of other university facilities that had to remain open during works.
Perhaps only in the 1960s would anyone have placed a gymnasium, squash courts, snooker halls and a series of rowing tanks above a theatre auditorium 鈥� and then surrounded it on three sides by a university, with a student refectory squeezed in underneath for good measure. Such is the structural stranglehold by which London鈥檚 Bloomsbury Theatre finds itself constrained 鈥� one that an ambitious new 拢12m refurbishment scheme by Nicholas Hare Architects has now done its best to unlock.
The Bloomsbury Theatre was designed, with apparent multifunctional zeal, by architectural practice James Cubitt & Partners in 1968. As the University of London goes, it is a fairly restrained example of brutalist design, with an arched brick and concrete facade supporting a blank, cantilevered attic storey.
The theatre鈥檚 name at its time of opening was the Central Collegiate 微密圈, which explains its multipurpose composition: it was essentially established as a combined recreational facility for University College London, now known as UCL, which owns the building and within whose loosely defined Bloomsbury campus it is located. While the facility provided the aforesaid sports facilities on its upper floors, its showpiece was the 550-seat theatre on its lower levels, after which the entire building was renamed in 1982.
UCL has never offered courses in drama or theatre studies, so this lavish facility was and is used purely for extracurricular productions 鈥� both student shows and independent productions unrelated to the university, ranging from West End shows to stand-up comedy nights. Over the decades it has built up an affectionate fanbase both within and without its academic environs.
The original building, however, had some very obvious drawbacks. These included a small, congested entrance and limited bar and foyer space, not to mention the immense structural and mechanical complexity consequent on having a theatre sandwiched between a diverse range of other building types and functions. As Nicholas Hare associate Andrew Hayes points out: 鈥淚t鈥檚 like a huge sandwich where there鈥檚 tonnes of bread.鈥�
It is these shortcomings 鈥� along with the updating of the theatre鈥檚 rather dated fixtures and fittings 鈥� that have been addressed in the new refurbishment, which was unveiled at the Bloomsbury Theatre鈥檚 reopening last month.
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Site challenges
The refurbishment project was made all the more challenging because the limited access allowed by the theatre鈥檚 centre location within the building meant that all construction materials had to be brought in through a single door in the basement. Another difficulty was the need to keep all the spaces around the theatre operational throughout the project.
This latter challenge was further complicated by the fact that, in another example of its convoluted 1960s composition, the building鈥檚 two fire escapes were shared with neighbouring buildings so had to remain accessible throughout. One of these buildings is UCL鈥檚 new Student Centre, which opened last month and was concurrently designed by the same architect (see 鈥淭he build next door鈥�, below).
But the biggest challenge of all involved the renewal of all the theatre鈥檚 convoluted services while not interfering with those services that served other parts of the same building. Nicholas Hare鈥檚 Hays says: 鈥淲e replaced the theatre鈥檚 entire services and this was probably the single biggest challenge of the project.
鈥淚t required us to undertake a significant amount of work that involved us trying to understand the extent of historic and redundant services, as well as the live ones which crisscrossed the theatre yet fed other parts of the building and therefore had to be kept live.鈥�