The Stage

No encore for Mermaid Theatre

Published Tuesday 10 August 2010 at 13:59 by Natalie Woolman

London’s Mermaid Theatre, which recently hosted BBC Radio 2’s celebration of Les Miserables’ 25th anniversary, is set to be demolished to make way for a new hotel in the City with no hope of the £6 million compensation previously discussed.

The City of London Corporation sealed the fate of the Mermaid this month when it granted planning permission for the £250 million development, which will be designed by architects Alsop Sparch and include a five star hotel, to be built on the site.

Negotiations with a developer in 2000, that would have seen a sum of £6 million given to London theatre to compensate for the loss of the venue, are immaterial after the local authority granted a change of use certificate to the building last year, stripping it of its theatrical status.

The Mermaid is now considered to be a conference and events centre, after developers Blackfriars were able to prove that it had not been used as a theatre for more than a decade. Dancing and concerts like BBC Radio 2’s Friday Night is Music Night do not qualify as theatre. As a result, compensation is not required from the developers.

Mhora Samuel, director of heritage body Theatres Trust, which has campaigned on behalf of the Mermaid since 2001, said: “A commercial developer has taken full advantage of planning law to deny valuable funds that could have gone towards theatres in the City of London at a time when the cultural sector is facing deep cuts and there is an increasing emphasis being placed on the role of the corporate sector as a supporter of the arts.”

She added that the theatre industry has lost an opportunity to capitalise on the success of the Bankside area as a “cultural destination”.

In response to the planning application, the City Heritage Society states: “While the South Bank in the past 20 years has created an international art centre at the Tate Modern out of a redundant historic building and also recreated the Globe Theatre, the philistine north bank abandoned to traffic and then discarded its only public cultural asset on the banks of the Thames - the Mermaid Theatre.”

City of London planning officer Peter Rees said: “The proposal to situate a hotel on the site where the Mermaid Theatre used to sit will help to service a very real need for more hotel space in the City and will further enhance the City’s reputation as a world class business environment.”

Actor and director Bernard Miles started work on the Mermaid Theatre in 1957 in Puddle Dock which had been damaged in the Blitz. Past performances at the venue include Ian McKellen playing Private Dennis O’Flaherty in George Bernard Shaw’s O’Flaherty VC in 1966 and Radio 2 currently uses it regularly for concerts as well as its popular strand Friday Night is Music Night. From 1996, the now-defunct Save London’s Theatres Campaign organised a high-profile battle to try to save the venue.