Fairfield Halls

Fairfield Halls is an arts, entertainment and conference centre located in Croydon, London. It opened in 1962 and contains a theatre and gallery, and the large concert hall has been regularly used for BBC television, radio and orchestral recordings. Fairfield Halls closed for two years for a £30 million redevelopment in July 2016. Although the venue has been a major venue for professional music, plays, musicals, stand-up comedy and classical music, a significant proportion of Fairfield's programme has been for community events. It was frequently used by local schools as the venue for their annual choral concerts, as well as being regularly used by local music, opera, amateur dramatic and religious organisations. The Concert Hall features a cinema with Croydon's largest cinema screen. HistoryThe halls are built on the site of Croydon's historic "Fair Field", which hosted a well-known fair up until around 1860, and above disused railway cuttings which used to link the main London to Brighton railway to Croydon Central Station in what is now Queen's Gardens. Between 1930 and 1962 the land was home to both a car park and air raid shelters during the war. The venue was 50 years old in 2012 and an anniversary concert by the London Mozart Players was attended by the Earl of Wessex. A website was also launched to celebrate both the venue's history and to act as an ongoing archive, containing 2, 000 digitised images accessed via text and keyword searches. This makes it one of the largest digitised venue archives in Europe.

Fairfield Halls is an arts, entertainment and conference centre located in Croydon, London. It opened in 1962 and contains a theatre and gallery, and the large concert hall has been regularly used for BBC television, radio and orchestral recordings. Fairfield Halls closed for two years for a £30 million redevelopment in July 2016. Although the venue has been a major venue for professional music, plays, musicals, stand-up comedy and classical music, a significant proportion of Fairfield's programme has been for community events. It was frequently used by local schools as the venue for their annual choral concerts, as well as being regularly used by local music, opera, amateur dramatic and religious organisations. The Concert Hall features a cinema with Croydon's largest cinema screen. HistoryThe halls are built on the site of Croydon's historic "Fair Field", which hosted a well-known fair up until around 1860, and above disused railway cuttings which used to link the main London to Brighton railway to Croydon Central Station in what is now Queen's Gardens. Between 1930 and 1962 the land was home to both a car park and air raid shelters during the war. The venue was 50 years old in 2012 and an anniversary concert by the London Mozart Players was attended by the Earl of Wessex. A website was also launched to celebrate both the venue's history and to act as an ongoing archive, containing 2, 000 digitised images accessed via text and keyword searches. This makes it one of the largest digitised venue archives in Europe.