Liverpool Arts: LAURA DAVIS: Who wants to reopen Garston’s Empire Theatre?

WHICH building in Liverpool would you choose to regenerate if you could pick from any that are not currently in use?

I would go for the former Irish Centre – the Wellington Rooms on Mount Pleasant.

That’s partly for personal reasons. It’s where I first learned to play the violin when I was just five and I have lovely memories of my dad and his friends meeting for a session there in the early-80s, the air thick with pipe smoke and the smell of tweed.

Last year, during Heritage Open Day, I went for a look around and, despite the holes in the floor and everything seeming a lot smaller, it was pretty much as I remembered.

Even the velvet curtains were still hanging above the stage where my sister and I had once stood as two of a group of assorted angels in the Nativity play – tightly bound in white crepe paper, a wreath of silver tinsel on our heads.

We’re lucky in Liverpool that so many of our once deserted buildings have been given new uses, even though notable examples remain dilapidated – the Stanley Dock Tobacco Warehouse immediately springs to mind.

Despite the fact that it was touch and go for so many of our theatres in the 1980s, just one is left on the Theatres at Risk Register, compiled each year by national advisory body The Theatres Trust.

The most recent list, which has just been released, features 49 theatre buildings of the estimated 2,000 in the UK – that’s seven fewer than last year, although sadly that’s because some no longer exist.

Seventeen new ones, including Margate’s Theatre Royal, have been added.

Factors considered to put them at risk include sale or change of ownership, funding difficulties, poor quality of operation threatening the building’s continuing use, high cost of maintenance or refurbishment works, local development adversely affecting access or restricting future expansion/improvements, threat of demolition, the building alteration to another use and threat to the building or theatre itself through decay or irreversible alterations.

The one Liverpool theatre on the list spent most of its life not as a theatre, but more than 40 years as a cinema and 30 as a bingo hall.

The Empire, on James Street, Garston, was built in 1915 and was used as a theatre for just three years, possibly due to the First World War when many venues across the country were forced to close.

It has been closed since 2009 but retains many of its original features, including a marble staircase, curved balcony front and high-arched proscenium, and is considered by The Theatre’s Trust to be “architecturally important”.

That’s the Empire’s past – so what of its future?

The Theatres Trust hopes that since the introduction of the Localism Act last November – the same one that allowed Liverpool City Council to be headed by a mayor – local communities will find it easier to take over abandoned venues.

When a building is up for sale, the Act buys community groups time to develop a bid and raise the money.

It’s a big challenge but we’re a city that loves a dare – is there anyone ready to reopen the Garston Empire?

And, while they’re at it, there’s a lovely old building on Mount Pleasant that’s worth a second look.