So what has changed? Firstly, the temporary radical-theatre experiment known as the Young Vic, a breezeblock-budget venture a few hundred yards east along The Cut, became a fixture. Designed by the underrated theatre architect Bill Howell and opened in 1970 with a projected life of five years, it is now 33 and shows it. Surrounded by tents and rusting shipping containers as storage, it looks like a shanty town. Nobody has ever claimed it was pretty, though the way Howell used an existing tiled butcher's shop to provide a foyer for the theatre was always charming, and the intimate little thrust-stage auditorium is magical. The Young Vic is now about to begin a £12.5 million upgrade plan by Steve Tompkins of Haworth Tompkins, responsible for the revamped Royal Court and Regent's Park open air theatres as well as the two temporary Almeida theatres.

Tompkins comes with a pedigree: a love of real theatre, as opposed to monument-building. Accordingly he is keeping the ad-hoc feel of the Young Vic - along with the butcher's shop and auditorium - but tweaking them, providing better back-of house and foyer space on what is a very tight site, raising the roof of the auditorium and making movement around it easier. For Tompkins, the architecture has to remain subservient to what he regards as the Young Vic's real values: "light-footed, critically engaged and classless" as he puts it. Ask him to tell you what he likes about the place, and he is likely to show you a photo of a bit of once rough old concrete floor, worn smooth with time, wear, and polish. For Tompkins, this job is all to do with the almost medieval business of accretion: not sweeping away and starting afresh, but keeping the best parts, improving them, adding new sections around the heart of the theatre. He is one of the few architects I know who actively enjoys working on a rock-bottom budget, though the costly Royal Court project might suggest otherwise.