GRAHAM SUTHERLAND: Back on site at our Gorbals home

After three months of lockdown, work on our building redevelopment is getting underway again on site.

Graham Sutherland, our Head of Production continues his blog cataloguing the project.  In this extract from his latest update, he shares where work got to before lock-down:

The original theatre building surrounded by the piling mat ready for the construction of the new build elements

In line with government guidance, the construction site was forced to close in March 2020 as the Covid-19 pandemic crisis unfolded. 

Although very little has happened physically on site, there have been a lot of Zoom meetings and emails and drawings flying back and forth. We have been meeting regularly with our project manager, architects, consultants and the contractors online to finalise construction drawings and information to make us as prepared as we can be for the re-start. 

Three months have passed and we can finally get back on site and start things up again. I thought it would be good to talk about what is happening as we open back up and where we got to before lock-down.

Where Are We Now?

By the time of the lockdown, we had just about completed the external demolition on site and prepared it for the new building work to start.

Around the historic auditorium, buildings were demolished and the area flattened out and filled with ballast to create a piling mat. This will support the new structures going in, including the new foyer, cafe, bars and studio theatre as well as learning and rehearsal spaces.

At the time of the last update on external demolition we still had old basement areas that needed clearing and a substantial concrete slab in front of the old auditorium. This slab turned out to be much thicker than historic drawings had led us to believe and there were a multitude of piles in places that we were not expecting either.

Auditorium gable wall on the left – Demolition work on the thick concrete slab above the old basement. More than the 200mm thicker we were expecting! 

In the photo above on the left you can just make out an arch of one of the two tunnels that used to extend under the front of the building. They were demolished as part of the 1988 development, but they had various uses over the years including a bowling alley and a shooting gallery. 

Plans from 1948. You can see the two tunnels in the basement in the bottom left of the plan and you can just make out the arches below the slab in the image top left (labelled miniature rifle range)

Before the slab could be taken out it had to be cut up using an enormous circular saw to make the pieces more manageable. The existing buildings also had to be structurally stabilised to ensure they could cope with any disturbance the slab removal might cause. This included bricking up old openings, bracing others and work to the neighbouring building to compensate for poor brickwork. 

The project team standing in the old basement space (standing close to each another in a pre-Covid environment!)

Everything was filled in, levelled out and compacted down. With the two arched doorways in mid-air, there is a significant change in height compared to the old slab. The doorways will be cut down to become taller so that the entrance to the auditorium will be the same as street-level improving accessibility by negating the need for stairs and ramps throughout the new foyer. 

These stone arches above the doors are an absolute gift and totally unexpected having been previously boxed in with wood and plasterboard. Since their discovery, the architects have worked them into a new design for the foyer which I will look at in more detail in a future post. 

Auditorium gable wall – bracing or brick in all vulnerable openings 

Inside the auditorium, on the other side of this wall, we had just started on the internal strip out as we went into lock-down. 

The room slopes up from the main entrance doors and then back down to the back of where the seats used to be, a few metres in front of the remaining bit of the control room. In the new design, you will come into the auditorium through the main doors at a much lower level and then rise uphill to the back of the seats. This is what enables us to level out the front-of-house areas. 

View from the where the door used to be at the back of the auditorium. Main entrance doors on the left. On the right, looking through where the old director's box was at the rest of the auditorium towards the stage. 

The new design will make better use of space and features a new central control room for lighting and sound, with a dedicated audio description booth. There are also flat level areas with good views on either side of the control room that are well suited to wheelchair users. 

What’s next?

Now that we are back on site, work can resume, picking up where we left off.

Activity will continue in the auditorium and we have one major piece of external demolition to complete to remove the derelict building at the rear of the site.

Inside the building, we will also start some of the more significant internal alterations in back of house.

The Coronavirus pandemic has caused delay and progress back on site might be slower than we had originally anticipated, but it is extremely heartening to finally get work underway again.

Written by Graham Sutherland for gsutherland.co.uk, 22 June 2020 as part of his most recent blog about starting up after lockdown. Read this full blog post here: gsutherland.co.uk/starting-up-again/ including how the site has been made COVID secure and what is planned next. Graham will be continuing to blog about the project in the coming months.

The Citizens Theatre building is undergoing the first major redevelopment in its 140-year history. The newly redeveloped theatre will restore a historic part of Glasgow’s cultural heritage, enable us to engage more people in our Learning programme, and host a bigger and better programme of productions. For the first time, we’ll be able to welcome everyone to take part in the creative life of our theatre.

We need your help to ensure that the redevelopment is delivered on time, and that we can once again re-open the doors of the Citizens Theatre. You can donate online and are hugely grateful for all donations towards this project.