Perhaps only in the 1960s would anyone have placed a gymnasium, squash courts, snooker halls and a series of rowing tanks above a theatre auditorium … and then surrounded it on three sides by a university, with a student refectory squeezed in underneath for good measure. Such is the structural stranglehold by which London’s Bloomsbury Theatre finds itself constrained – one that an ambitious new £12m refurbishment scheme by Nicholas Hare Architects has now done its best to unlock. 

The Bloomsbury Theatre was designed, with apparent multifunctional zeal, by architectural practice James Cubitt & Partners in 1968. As the University of London goes, it is a fairly restrained example of brutalist design, with an arched brick and concrete facade supporting a blank, cantilevered attic storey.  

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