Production Credits
The Hippodrome

Owner and producer:  Peter Stringfellow
Interior Design:  Bulldog Design, Leeds
ID managers:  Paul Roberts & Amanda Fletcher
Quantity Surveyor:  Michael Crowe
Eminence grise:  Martin Disney
Discotheque production design:  Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park
Lighting Design: Tony Gottellier
Audio Design:  Greenwich Audio Services
Automation:  Giles Gibson
Technical Manager:  Phil Pyke
Mechanical effects fabrication:
Lighting pods: Peter Kemp Engineering
Back-bar mobiles:  Mike Crisp, Tas Stage Engineering
Sheet metal:  P&R Engineering, Deptford


Mark Fisher writes:
Peter Stringfellow completed his purchase of the ‘Talk of the Town’ in 1983.  Architecturally the building had a chequered history.  Originally opened in 1900 as a spectacular Victorian fantasy, the richly decorated interior was almost completely destroyed in 1958 when the building was converted into a cabaret restaurant.

The London Hippodrome was designed by Frank Matcham, the most prolific theatre architect of his day.  The owner, Edward Moss (who founded Moss Empires, a UK wide chain of music hall theatres) required a flagship building in central London.  The building was designed as a combination of theatre and circus.  The main stage sat upstage of a conventional proscenium arch, surmounted by a fly loft and smoke lantern.  A 12m diameter circus ring was placed downstage of the arch, where the stalls seats would normally have been located.  The ring was in fact a water tank, mounted on hydraulic rams that allowed it to be raised and lowered by 2.4m.  It could be used dry, or flooded with water, and contained eight fountains with 6m high jets.  The surrounding basement contained pens for circus animals, arranged around a circular ramp beneath the stalls that gave access to the tank.  The large downstage arena forced Marcham to create an unusually open auditorium with sweeping balconies, something that Stringfellow was able to exploit when he converted the building into a London’s largest night club.

The water circus idea was copied from Paris.  In the first years of the 20C, the owners created performances with seals, sea-lions, polar bears and elephants.  The theatre was decorated in a decadent French renaissance style in which soaring oak-panelled galleries and balconies were mixed with gilded fibrous plaster garlands, scrolls and angels.  High above the circus ring, the ornate ceiling culminated in a minstrel’s gallery and a sliding roof that opened to the stars.  The theatre played host to tight-wire walkers who crossed the room high above the dangerous beasts in the water below, and on several occasions a trick cyclist who rode around the rim of the open skylight before plunging into the pool.

The exotic interior was almost completely destroyed in 1958 when Bernard Delfont and Charles Forte converted the building into the ‘Talk of the Town’.  Post-war Britain had little sympathy for Victoriana, and the first night souvenir program boasted of the destruction wrought by ‘operation pickaxe’.  The conversion closed off the upper balcony with a suspended ceiling.  Below the ceiling, the fairytale interior was ripped out and replaced with a low-rent 50’s version of Art-Deco; the gloss-black and chrome state-of-the-art stage installation contrasting nicely with the dark blue walls decorated with backlit golden coral sconce lights.  The stage was designed for extravagant musical revues with big bands, dancing girls and water and fire effects.  The proscenium stage incorporated multiple lifts and sliding trucks that formed a grand terrace, and the faces of the proscenium arch folded down to create dramatic staircase entrances.  The circus ring was decked over with a dance floor.  The centre of the dance-floor rose up to form a thrust stage that itself contained a complex series of lifts and traps.

The Bulldog design for the auditorium took advantage of the open arena that was one of the main features of Matcham’s original design.  They annexed the theatre stage as a VIP bar area.  Floor levels were adjusted and the pass-through doors were widened to form a race-track that united stage and auditorium circulation, creating an in-the-round venue out of what had previously been a conventional theatre.  This extreme reconstruction of the original theatre created a very successful promenade around the central volume of the room.  Bars and banquettes filled the space between the promenade and the dance floor, where the existing complex thrust stage lift was retained.

For the discotheque production design, Fisher and Park created a transforming space.  At the start of an evening, the dance floor was a high, open space; the full volume of what remained of the original Matcham interior beneath the 1958 suspended ceiling.  As the evening unfolded, so too did the building.  Lighting pods dropped down from silos above the false ceiling that closed off the upper circle, and petals deployed from them to create a new ceiling grid at the level of the dress circle, five or six metres above the dance floor.  A high power PA system dropped down at the same time.  When the time came for an act to showcase on the stage, the audience stepped back to allow the thrust stage to rise up, and the lighting pods retracted into the ceiling.  On each side of the back-bar, pilasters transformed into space-craft that tracked out over the audience to side-lighting positions on each side of the stage.  When the space-craft arrived on station, their ‘solar panels’ deployed to form floodlights for the stage performance.  At the end of the showcase, the spacecraft returned to dock and the lighting pods redeployed.  On their second appearance, a range of built-in kinetic effects in the petals were unleashed to heighten the performance.

The dimmers and relays for the lighting and effects in the pod petals were locally mounted in the chassis of each unit.  The main reason for this was that it simplified the power and control distribution to the large number of light fixtures and electric motors on each unit.  It seemed like a good idea at the time, but it meant that to access to the dimmers for maintenance, a lighting pod first had to be lowered to the dance floor and its petals opened.  It would have been more efficient (and produced a lighter weight pod) to mount all the dimmers in the dimmer room.  The dimmers were built by Peter WynnWilson & Tony Gottelier, and featured their proprietary version of a daisy-chain control system, which preceded the invention of DMX by several years.

The project was conceived and developed at a time when digital show control was in its infancy.  The practical consequence of this was that – for a commercial nightclub project – it was unaffordable.  In the original installation, all motion control was electromechanical.  Direct-struck limit switches, floor selectors and rotary limit switches were interlocked by a complex matrix of relays.  The control of the lighting pods presented some interesting challenges.  When the petals were folded up, the pods measured 1.2m in diameter, but when the petals were deployed their diameter increased to over 6m.  The pods moved in and out of silos with a clearance of 100mm around, and the petals deployed and retracted over the heads of the dancing audience.  To prevent the lighting pods from collapsing the ceiling onto the heads of the dancers below, the interlocks between the petal deployment and the vertical movement had to be fail-safe.  The installation remained in place for over twenty years before being ripped out in a major refurbishment in 2005.

Between 1976 and 1983 Mark Fisher and Jonathan Park collaborated on a number of projects.  In 1984 they formalized their working relationship as the Fisher Park Partnership.  Their partnership was dissolved in 1994.