Building a great Empire

"They don't make them like they used to" is usually a phrase that has me reaching for my revolver. They do not, indeed, make damp, cold houses with no sanitation the way they used to. They do not make cholera epidemics, or illiteracy, or infant mortality, or capital punishment, or poverty, or racial and sexual discrimination the way they used to in the 19th century. Nor do they make Spam, or Austin Allegros, or Mateus Rosé, or wonky black-and-white TV sets the way they used to in the not-so-distant past. Thank God for that.

There is one exception. They don't make theatres like they used to in the great building boom at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. Even then, no one made them like Frank Matcham, the architect who knocked out about 150 theatres. And Matcham, despite creating the Coliseum, Criterion, Lyceum and numerous other London theatres, plus the Buxton Opera House and the Bradford Alhambra, never made anything quite like the Hackney Empire of 1901, which reopens this week after a £15 million renovation by architect Tim Ronalds.

A Matcham theatre is a combination of practical action and fantasy. Their design is driven by the commercial reality of the entrepreneurs who built them, with immense ingenuity applied to packing as many paying seats as possible (plus standing room) on to the awkward, cheap plots of land on which they were built. They are rigorous in their consideration of sightlines and acoustics, and there is rarely a bad seat in the house.

They used the then latest technology, such as wide-spanning steel construction and electric light, to remove the need for columns or dangerous and hot gas-lighting. As time is money, they were built at breakneck speed and much of their construction was prefabricated, a technique since applied to oil rigs and big city office buildings. Everything from the steel structure to decorative plasterwork was put together in workshops and factories, and brought to the site ready-made.

In the theatres' appearance, meanwhile, everything was done to dissemble the hard graft, both of the construction and of the everyday lives of the audience. The architectural history of the world was plundered, without regard for rules or precedent, for whatever was fantastic, whatever could be made to look insubstantial and dream-like, whatever glittered and writhed was as far removed as possible from the hard brick streets of the industrial cities outside.

The Hackney Empire's name declares its ambition, yoking Hackney (parochial, humdrum, familiar) to Empire (grand, magnificent, global, exotic), and its interior is part Viennese ballroom, part Hindu, part Islamic, part Italian mannerist, and part a generic style of sheer ornament, which, long before the term was common, Matcham himself called Victorian. Although contained within a simple brick box, the ludicrously ornate auditorium seems to have no boundaries, just endlessly receding layers of balustrades, arcades, draperies and bas-relief.

Pillars, which might be expected to be holding up part of the building, look as if they are floating in air, and the concealed steelwork of the balconies makes them appear to hover. There is a blurring of inside and out: the auditorium is meant to look something like a ballroom, yet there are domed constructions inside it, which belong to the outside world. The effect of this blurring and reversal is to make the place seem weightless and ephemeral, a stage-set more than a building, which was usually more magnificent than the relatively downbeat settings for the variety acts on the stage itself.

For the most part, these theatres really were ephemeral. Built at speed at a time when theatre was the fastest-growing form of entertainment, their heyday was finished by the First World War. Cinema took over, and the inter-war movie palaces became the spiritual heirs of Matcham's theatres, many of which were converted to show films.

Then there was TV, and both cinemas and theatres slumped into a twilight existence as bingo halls, if they were lucky. By the 1970s most, including more than three-quarters of Matcham's output, had been demolished. As Matcham had never been regarded as a serious architect, little effort was made to save them.

The Hackney Empire followed a similar path, becoming a cinema and a bingo hall before Mecca, rather than pay the costs of its restoration, chose to sell it. It has since become a theatre again, one of very few that genuinely break the boundaries between "highbrow" and "popular" entertainment.