We have to treasure the West End's crown jewels

The phrase "the West End" is known all over the world: for most tourists, it is almost synonymous with London. There are more theatres in that small area than can be found in any other city in the world, not excluding New York. And unlike New York - its only rival in this regard, whose theatres are oddly faceless, with often rather ugly, unwelcoming façades - London's theatres, for the most part, are things of beauty.

Most of them are late Victorian or Edwardian, and they embody that era at its gayest and most ornamental, full of witty flourishes and a sense of event: something exciting and fun goes on here, they seem to announce.

The auditoriums continue the playfulness, with droll details everywhere, often with a theme of some sort which repays attention and shows the taste and fantasy of the architect.

They are warm, welcoming places, lush and padded and - how can one avoid the word? - theatrical. Once the curtain goes up, there is straight away a relationship between the audience and the actors that those earlier architects seemed instinctively to understand: a gift for instant intimacy.

Standing on one of those stages, even in a really grand theatre such as Richard D'Oyly Carte's Palace, on Cambridge Circus, an actor immediately feels in contact with the whole house. It's as if you could put your arms round them.

This is to do with the horseshoe shape that most of them have (in my view, the most successful ever devised, completing a circle with the stage), and it provides the possibility of the most important thing that the theatre, as opposed to any mechanical medium, can offer: contact, interchange, interplay.

But all is not perfect in the West End garden. Despite the distinction of their design, most of these theatres were thrown up in great haste during a series of surges in theatre building, many of them in response to the new safety regulations brought in at the end of the 19th century. Obviously they were created for the conditions of their time: for audiences who were strictly segregated during the interval, in which different sections of the auditorium were intended for different social classes, and in which the actors - other than the stars (who often built the theatres themselves) - were herded into tiny, unlit and underheated kennels.

Time has not been kind to these hastily thrown-up edifices. They demand intense and costly maintenance. The original owners of the theatres may have made large profits but it has been an exponential decline since then. The sums made by most owners these days are either negligible or actually in negative figures.

They need serious repair, refurbishment and in some cases restructuring, the sort of extensive work that was done - at a cost of some £3 million - at the Royal Court Theatre. Although certain owners - notably Cameron Mackintosh and Lord Lloyd-Webber - have spent large sums of money on the fabric, there is still a long way to go.

The Royal Court's track record with new writing made it possible to raise large sums of money, and a fine job it did. But because the West End is conceived of as commercial it is condemned to fend for itself, to live or die by the market.

The fact is that it has transcended its origins and has become an iconic feature of the capital, an extraordinary, fascinating and original phenomenon. It is, for many, the real "London experience", not to be compared architecturally with St Paul's Cathedral or the Tower of London but no less central to London's mythology and its personality.

Unlike other monuments, it is not a museum, it is alive and kicking. It is not pompous or grand but a marketplace, a kind of bazaar where all manner of fabulous things may be found along with an inevitable amount of dross. The hottest current American star, the most brilliant new young Shakespearean director, the most outrageous new musical; one-man shows, shockingly challenging shows from the bleak hinterland of society, plays and musical comedies that go round the world - they are all here.

There is an incomparable variety of theatres: exquisite bijou venues such as the Duchess, massive and magnificent temples such as Drury Lane and the London Palladium, playhouses that have housed actors and productions for centuries and are filled with all the great ghosts of performances past.

So how to fund the huge costs of renovation, estimated at more than £250 million, for the whole of the West End?

It is surely reasonable that a small levy could be imposed to help bring these glorious places up to 21st-century levels of comfort and convenience without sacrificing any of their aesthetic charms and the expertise of their design. The London Coliseum and the Palace theatres have shown how thrilling these buildings can be when tactfully and imaginatively refurbished, and how hospitable they become when legroom, air conditioning, spacious foyers and amenable amenities are installed.

It is also surely reasonable that government should recognise the importance of these theatres and put up the cash to restore them to what they could be. Whether the money ends up coming from the Department for Culture, the National Lottery or the London Development Agency is something for ministers and the Mayor to work out. But they must do so soon, before the fabric of some of these great buildings becomes even more sadly dilapidated.

For actors, these theatres are essential venues in which to communicate with the public; for London they are a kind of flagship of what British theatre means and has meant.

The moan goes up every so often that there are too many of them, that they should be knocked down or divided up. Londoners too rarely celebrate what is wonderful about their city, preferring to see what is unsatisfactory.

The theatrical West End is a joyous, a unique, a thrilling phenomenon, only held back from absolute comfort and convenience by what, in terms of its contribution to Britain's image as a mecca of culture and civilisation, are small sums. If anything deserves an infusion of public cash it is this Aladdin's cave of theatrical delights.