Fairfield Halls – Little Manhattan Audio Trail Transcript
The Fairfield Halls building is named after the plot of land it’s built on, which is where Croydon’s historic fairs were held for centuries. The fairs traditionally held there were brought to an end in the 1860s when work began to build Croydon Central Station, whose platforms were on the site of what is now Queen’s Gardens and the Town Hall. The station closed in 1890 because it was unprofitable, and after it was demolished a short section from the main line as far as Park Lane remained in use as Fairfield Yard. This engineer’s yard operated until the 1930s when it was bought by Croydon Council, who promoted a competition in 1935 to design a new Civic Centre for the future. Plans were delayed by the outbreak of war and resurrected in the mid-1950s.
After the completion of the Technical College in 1959, the priority for the redevelopment programme was entertainment and cultural facilities. The old Public Halls on the corner of George Street and Wellesley Road had been demolished in 1957, while on the High Street, the Davis Theatre and the Grand Theatre had both closed in 1959 and been replaced by Davis House and Grosvenor House office blocks.
To fulfil the need for a new cultural venue, Fairfield Halls was built between 1960 and 1962 by Robert Atkinson and Partners. Using a very different style to their building of the Technical College, a large central concert hall with the auditorium at first-floor level was built between the smaller Ashcroft Theatre and the Arnhem Gallery. The building’s appearance is very similar to a scaled-down version of London’s Royal Festival Hall, built a decade earlier. Hope Bagenal was the acoustic consultant on both projects, and Fairfield Hall’s acoustics benefited greatly from what had been learnt on the Royal Festival Hall’s earlier build. Consequently, Fairfield Halls’ world-class 1,802-seat Concert Hall is famed for its acoustics, which are regarded as amongst the best in the UK, resulting in many classical recordings and rehearsals taking place in Croydon.
Fairfield Halls was opened by Her Majesty the Queen Mother in November 1962. The inaugural performance in the concert hall was given by the BBC Symphony Orchestra led by Sir Malcolm Sergeant with soloist Yehudi Menuhin. In the Ashcroft Theatre, Peggy Ashcroft delivered a monologue written especially by John Betjemin, followed by the play, Royal Gambit with Michael Denison and Dulcie Gray.
The following year, on the 25th of April 1963, the concert hall hosted two performances by a new band called the Beatles, as part of a Mersey Beat Tour just a month after their first album, Please Please Me was released. A young man, Andy Wright, who was doing work experience at the halls, had a camera with him and captured some unique early images of the group on stage which were rediscovered nearly 50 years later.
Control for the Fairfield Halls passed from the Council to a charitable trust in 1993. In 2016, the building closed for major refurbishment and re-opened in September 2019 managed by BH Live, a social interest company based in Bournemouth. Many of the building’s 1960s features have been refurbished and remain to showcase the history of the building.
