The ‘After’
I have known Cambridge Arts Theatre for most of my life.
Some of my earliest memories of Cambridge are bound up with that part of the city: family visits to the roof terrace restaurant, my father’s office nearby on King’s Parade, the sense that this theatre sat not apart from the life of the city, but right inside it. Later, in the 1990s, I photographed the building for Bland Brown and Cole. To return now, and to photograph Ian Chalk Architects’ renewal of the auditorium from start to finish, has felt less like a commission than a long conversation resumed.
The pleasure of photographing a project like this lies not only in the finished room, although the finished room is beautiful. It lies in watching intent become matter. In the months on site, through dust, scaffolding, exposed structure, mock-ups, unfinished joinery, conversations with staff, the technical team, project directors, consultants and contractors, one begins to understand the true complexity of stewardship. A theatre is never simply a building. It is a machine, a workplace, a civic room, a memory chamber, and a nightly act of trust between performers and audience.
What struck me most was the care. Care in the way the auditorium’s intimacy was protected. Care in the way new technical capacity was threaded into an old fabric without overwhelming it. Care in the conversations with those who know the building through use rather than theory: the people who open the doors, light the stage, manage the turnarounds, dress the rooms, calm the anxieties, and make the evening possible.
Good refurbishment is not nostalgia. It is judgement. It requires knowing what to touch, what to leave alone, and what must be fought for. Ian Chalk Architects have given Cambridge Arts Theatre a renewed presence without diminishing its spirit. The room still feels close, warm, expectant. It still holds that particular theatrical charge: the sense that anything might happen, and that everyone present is somehow implicated.
To photograph it from beginning to end has been a privilege. Buildings such as this do not belong only to their owners, or their architects, or even to their moment. They belong to the accumulated lives that pass through them. The best work allows that accumulation to continue.
Harper Tackley | Savills | Buro Happold | Cocksedge Building Contractors Limited | Neil Burke Joinery Ltd. | Cambridge Arts Theatre | Ian Chalk Architects
