Sticking with Hippo memories... I’m not hip enough for Rock City
Perhaps it’s time to knock down the Hippodrome after all... a controversial point of view from
THERE was a time when I wanted Derby’s Hippodrome to be restored to its former glory. Its glory as a theatre that is, not as a bingo hall which was how the building spent the last 46 years of its life before even that venture saw it close again.
Distance lends enchantment. In the 1950s, the theatre was ten minutes’ walk from where I was growing up. We queued in Green Lane to see some of the greatest names in entertainment – Max Wall, Billy Cotton and his band, Winfred Atwell, Donald Peers, Reg Dixon, Arthur English, Beryl Read, and up and coming performers like Frankie Howerd, and Morecambe and Wise.
Then, in 1959, the Hippodrome closed, the death of yet another of Britain’s old-fashioned variety theatres, another victim of television’s ever-tightening grip on the nation.
At the time, I filed it all away, reopening the memory box only when the roof was ‘repaired’ and the old theatre building was slowly allowed to decay. It was particularly sad because when the wrecking crew trundled down Macklin Street in 2008, the Hippodrome’s stage and all the glorious plaster work were as bright and as well preserved as the day that the theatre curtain came down for the last time almost 50 years earlier.
As the building fell steadily into further disrepair, thanks to vandals and the weather, but also due to inaction by any official body that could have saved the Grade II Listed building, I began to think again of those happy evenings spent in the dress circle.
I harboured hopes that the Hippodrome could be saved, pointing out that if it could be returned to a working theatre, it could attract touring shows, crowds of theatre-goers, and the new businesses that would thrive on it all. It turns out that mine
was a hopeless dream.
This week, plans have been announced that would see the Hippodrome become a live music venue similar to Nottingham’s Rock City.
Schemes for the Hippodrome to become a performance venue again had been presented before. But, I have to face it, none would have produced the Hippodrome that I remembered. I’ll accept it now: that has gone for ever.
It will not surprise you to know that I’ve never set foot inside Rock City at Nottingham, and I doubt that I will ever attend the equivalent in Derby, should it ever come to pass. But the news did finally make up my mind. Stop chasing this dream that the golden days of the 1950s Hippodrome will ever return. So, knock it down, start again, and maybe that will herald the regeneration that the area so badly needs.
At the very least, do something at last …