Client: Park Theatre
Design: David Hughes Architects
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Size: 1,100 sq m
Cost: £2.5m
Completion time: 18 months
‘Today Finsbury Park is looking better than ever’. So says the website of Haringey Council. It’s talking about the actual park, of course, which is indeed looking well after a £5m restoration and improvement programme, thanks to the Heritage Lottery Fund. But you could say the same about the surrounding area too – especially since the arrival of the Park Theatre, a new building by David Hughes Architects, that brings a bit of high culture to this already vibrant and cosmopolitan section of north London.
A short stroll from Finsbury Park Tube station, the Park Theatre occupies a two-storey former office building, which now contains two performance spaces (a 200-seat main house and a flexible studio space of between 80 and 100 seats), a cafe/bar, a multi-function rehearsal space, three dressing rooms, and all the requisite back-of-house facilities.
Since it opened in May, the Theatre and its two bars have been hugely popular with local people; even so, getting the project off the ground wasn’t easy and David Hughes even found himself involved in helping raise the funds needed to build it, helping organise a charity gala hosted by supporter Sir Ian McKellen.
Hughes worked closely with Hoare Lea Lighting to develop what it describes as a ‘simple, but hugely effective, natural and artificial lighting strategy’. Both performance spaces have large skylights (blacked out for performances), to light the spaces during the day.
According to both practices, the use of rooflights to create bright, airy spaces throughout the building was a key design decision, and these are proving a huge hit with theatre goers, staff and visitors. There’s also LED house lighting, which can transform the colour of the whole theatre space. A dual level cafe-bar is connected by the atrium with a large rooflight that floods this space with daylight. Says Hughes: ‘The street frontage is extremely limited, so we created a fully glazed bay window, which floats over the pavement – regularly ‘dressed’ with graphics and projections. This has really become our shop window.’
The theatre was entirely financed through donations, fundraising and philanthropic gestures, so cost was a major consideration when it came to specifying materials, lighting and furniture.
‘This required discipline in specifying and design and we worked tirelessly with the client team to make sure every penny counted,’ says Hughes. Despite these constraints Hughes and the rest of the project team have created an interior that feels contemporary, friendly and welcoming with reclaimed furniture and lights and refurbished theatre fittings. The ground-floor bar front, for example, is the cut-down auditorium entrance doors from the demolished Wallsend Theatre in Tyne & Wear. The first-floor bar is clad with more than 200 show programmes, and old theatre books from The British Drama League library dangle on strings from the ceiling.
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