Claybury Hospital Recreation Hall

• Theatre ID
  2502
• Built / Converted
  1893
• Current state
  Extant
• Current use
  converted to other use
• Address
  Claybury Hospital, Woodford Bridge, Redbridge, London, Essex, IG8 8BY, England

Details

The Recreation or Entertainment Hall is at the centre of one of the big echelon-plan lunatic asylums built around London in the late nineteenth century. Claybury was designed by G T Hine and built 1888-93. Hine was responsible for more asylums than any other architect. Multi-purpose recreation or entertainment rooms were common in such institutions but only a few were of real architectural ambition (see also e.g. London: Normansfield and Wakefield: Stanley Royd). This one, described by an architectural historian who has seen most of them as 'a lovely room', is a huge space of ten bays with panelled walls, above which arched windows are set between piers which flow into elliptically curved ceiling beams. The stage has an ornamental proscenium of full-blooded Jacobean character, a theme carried through the alternating patterns of the ceiling panels. At the opposite end is a somewhat distant balcony on four slender columns. The stage is rather short of wing space but could be extended into adjoining rooms on either side to an additional depth of c.2x3m.

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• Events
  • 1893 Design/Construction:
    • George Thomas Hine - Architect
• Listings
  • Grade II
• Dimensions
  • Stage dimensions: Depth: 8m (c.26ft) Width: 12.7m (c.41ft)
  • Proscenium width: 9.3m (c.30ft)