The ‘before’ and the ‘during’.
There are buildings that belong to a city not simply because they occupy a site, but because they hold its memory. The Arts Theatre is one of those places.
For Cambridge, it has never been merely a theatre. It is a civic room, a house of imagination, a gathering place, a threshold between ordinary life and the heightened world of performance. For generations, people have passed through its doors carrying expectation, curiosity, nervousness, delight. They have left changed by laughter, by language, by music, by the strange collective electricity of sitting together in the dark while something live and unrepeatable unfolds before them.
My own memories of the Arts Theatre reach back far before I ever photographed it professionally. They are threaded through childhood and family, through the geography of central Cambridge, through the particular sensation of knowing a building before understanding its importance.
I remember visiting the roof terrace restaurant with my family. I remember the sense of occasion: the climb upwards, the prospect of the city, the theatre below and around us, the feeling that this was somewhere special. My father’s office was on King’s Parade, only moments away, and so the theatre was part of a familiar orbit, not remote, not abstract, but woven into the pattern of everyday life. It sat there, close to the colleges, close to the street, close to the life of the city, quietly accumulating meaning.
Years later, in the 1990s, I came back to the building with a camera, photographing it for Bland Brown and Cole architects. By then, the relationship had shifted. The place I had known through family and memory became a subject of attention. Photography has a way of slowing down affection. It asks you to look again at what you thought you already knew.
Through the lens, the Arts Theatre became both familiar and newly strange: a building of civic presence, but also of labour, craft, adaptation and care.
That is the great value of caring for a place like this. We are protecting a continuity of experience. We are allowing future audiences to inherit not a museum piece, but a living instrument, tuned again for use, capable of carrying new voices while still resonating with all that has passed through it before.
Theatres are among the most fragile and necessary of public buildings because they depend on belief. Every evening, they ask a community to gather, to suspend disbelief, to listen, to laugh, to be moved. Their value cannot be measured only in seats, acoustics, access, technical systems or square metres. Their deeper value lies in association: the friend met in the foyer, the family outing, the first production that stayed with you, the dinner before the show, the walk home afterwards through Cambridge streets, the jokes retold years later, the performers remembered, the evenings that somehow became part of the architecture itself.
