Campaigners launch new push to halt Brighton Hippodrome development
Campaigners looking to preserve the Brighton Hippodrome as a live performance venue have launched an eleventh hour bid to halt £18 million development plans.
The Our Brighton Hippodrome group has lodged an application to Brighton and Hove City Council for the listed building to become a community asset.
If approved, this would halt Kuig Property Investments’ plans to transform it into an eight-screen cinema, cafes, restaurants and shops for six months.
Campaigners claim it would give them chance to come up with an alternative scheme .
But some have questioned why the bid has been launched now after planning permission has been granted to convert the building.
Latest TV’s Javier Douglas reports.
Cllr Bowden repeats comments that have already been refuted. He asks where we were in 1965 when it became a bingo hall. I was at school, running a small theatre. He asks where we were 10 years ago. At that time it was a bingo hall and the issue of it changing to anything else did not arise.
He then ignores a fact of which he is well aware: that Academy Music Group was working to restore the Hippodrome as a live music venue until recently, which failed because of the council said late-night licensing was improbable. There was no attempt to consider it as a theatre until the cinema proposal was well under way.
Under national planning regulations it should have been ‘marketed’ for alternative uses that would cause the least harm to this Grade II* listed heritage asset. It wasn’t and as a result Our Brighton Hippodrome is having to work fast, against the odds, to be allowed to show that restoration as a theatre is in the best interests of the building, the council, the city, the community and the nation. We are sorry and sad that Cllr Bowden does not support that aspiration.
It’s also worth noting that in 1965 the then Brighton Borough Council went a long way towards buying the Hippodrome but withdrew when it Mecca took it over to become a bingo hall. Reports from the time indicate that the council planning committee had recommended demolishing it to build a multi-storey car park. Nearly 50 years on and the council still supports significant harm rather than appropriate restoration!