Text © Hugh Pearman, pictures © Benedict Luxmoore, www.luxmoore.co.uk. First published in The Sunday Times, March 14, 2004, as "How to make an entrance".
There are famous conservation victories, there are notoriously insensitive redevelopments, and, from time to time, you get the two combined. Such as an unearthed Shakespearian playhouse or a fragment of Roman city wall, buried in the basement of an ugly office block. But at the Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, West London, things have gone a stage further. There, you get three layers of history in one. You have the pioneering conservation victory wrapped up in lowest-common-denominator developer's floorspace with a £2.6 million piece of classic orthodox high-modern architecture to redeem it, just opened. It is an object lesson in the purest architectural pragmatism.
If you're a Londoner but you've never been to the Lyric, that might well be because you couldn't find the entrance. A few minutes before curtain-up, the ticket office commonly receives anguished calls from patrons lost on the street outside. You are directed down an unlikely passageway between two shops. And then you rise through several, seemingly endless levels, via what seems like some kind of student union bar, until finally you are in the broad, bland 1970s vestibules of the theatre. So you go in and - as if in some hallucinogenic spy movie of the period - suddenly you have timewarped into late Victorian London. People come: the theatre's reputation is high.
