The two buildings sit side-by-side on Sydney’s George Street, dwarfed by surrounding skyscrapers. They come properly into view from the opposite side of the street, in the shadow of the ornate Queen Victoria Building. Columns and archways adorn the two-storey facade on the left, while bay windows jut out elegantly beneath the fifth-floor balconies on the right. Pedestrians bustle along the retail strip below, most without ever looking up.
One of these buildings is the Globe Theatre, a 106-year-old cinema hidden from the public eye for decades. The other is 97-year-old Dudley House. Both have been determined by the National Trust to be rare, “irreplaceable” elements of Sydney’s architectural and cultural history.
But they may soon be obliterated from the streetscape. Neither building has statutory heritage protection, and now a development application to extend the nearby QT Hotel proposes they be destroyed.
‘The theatre to us was a mecca’
The Globe Theatre is Sydney’s only surviving Victorian Romanesque-style theatre. Constructed in 1914, its facade was designed by architect Clarence Backhouse to echo the QVB. It operated as a movie theatre until 1924 – notably running Rudolph Valentino in The Sheik for 26 weeks in 1922 – when it was taken over by music publishers J Albert and Son.
In 1942 the cinema was renovated to become a live broadcast theatre for Australia’s first 24-hour radio station, 2UW. A 110m aerial was erected on the roof, towering above much of the cityscape.
Gold Coast radio announcer Russ Walkington’s association with 2UW started in the late 1940s. “Deluxe Radio Theatre was there every Sunday night and it was quite a thing to get tickets to be in the audience for those shows,” he says.
He was hired by 2UW in 1960 to work the popular “happy, joke-telling, quickfire, toe-tapping” Saturday morning children’s variety show, the Coca-Cola Bottler’s Club, broadcast weekly from the theatre in front of a live audience.
“We’d do shows in the theatre on the stage, children’s talent quests,” he says. “Even the Sunday night hour-long dramas were all produced live in front of an audience.”
His former colleague Faye Inskip, 85, remembers those shows well. She was a voice actor in her teens, performing in radio dramas on the Globe stage. In the late 1950s, she started working in the 2UW record library, and coordinated the 50,000-strong fan club named for Walkington’s alter ego, Gerald the Talking Grasshopper.
“The children could write in and join the club,” she says. “One time we had a picnic at Watson’s Bay, Vaucluse. One year we decided to put on a Christmas pantomime [at the theatre] … and we auditioned the children from the Gerald the Grasshopper club.” The pantomime ran over three weekends, with proceeds going to the Blind Society.
The theatre was also used as a recording studio, notably for demos of 60s rock’n’roll juggernauts the Easybeats. John Diamond, 73, a one-time 2UW copyboy, remembers being sent there on errands and seeing Ted Albert and the band at work.
“Ted would come down with the tapes and they’d ask me to play them in the afternoon, and he’d go round to Ray’s office [Ray Bean, former 2UW program manager], big stereo speakers, and they’d sit and listen,” Diamond says. “Then he’d go back up to George Street and remix it.”
Walkington, now 84, says: “The theatre to us was a mecca; that’s where great things happened. It was part of the entertainment scene of Sydney in those days. Radio people were not so mysterious because there were people in the audience watching them.”
‘These hidden gems are so hard to save’
Dudley House was designed in 1923 by architects Burcham Clamp and MacKellar – the former a sometime business partner of Walter Burley Griffin. The National Trust has scant information on Dudley House’s history, but it has been on their register since 1993 for its “high aesthetic significance” due to a combination of architectural style influences.
The development application relating to both buildings was made by hospitality and entertainment company Greater Union Organisation Pty Ltd. It bought the Globe and Dudley House in 2017 – the pair having been sold as prime development opportunities with a feature made of the fact that they were not listed in the Sydney local environmental plan as heritage items, or on the statutory heritage registers run by the NSW and federal governments, despite lobbying by the National Trust.
The developer was required to submit a heritage assessment as part of its application. Managed by consulting firm Urbis, it concluded there was “no important physical evidence” of the Globe’s use as a cinema, that the fittings remaining from the radio period were “degraded” and “substantially modified”, and the facade was “modest and pedestrian” in style – a criticism they also made of Dudley House. The latter, they said, was “not an important example” of the architects’ work, lacked “refinement and resolution” and did not have “any defining or distinctive aesthetic attributes” or “demonstrate any technical achievement in its construction”.
The Globe’s architect, Backhouse, designed another theatre in Pitt Street in 1896. That was demolished in 1970 to construct the Hilton hotel.
The National Trust says there were once 495 historic film theatres in suburban Sydney. There are now only eight.
“In our view it is a very significant building,” says Graham Quint, the National Trust’s director of conservation. “Well before any development proposals came up we knew of the significance of the building and we sent that information off to the Sydney city council.”
The trust applied to Heritage NSW for an interim heritage order for both buildings in October 2019. It was declined.
In response to questions from Guardian Australia, Heritage NSW says interim heritage orders are granted only in cases of “immediate threat”, and that it is “satisfied that the City of Sydney is currently undertaking appropriate measures to fully investigate the significance of both buildings”.
The City of Sydney says it is “considering the heritage significance of the buildings as part of the development application process” and that, in line with the Sydney development control plan, a committee of heritage professionals has been appointed to examine and advise on the merits of the proposal.
Neither the City of Sydney nor Heritage NSW would comment on the timeline for assessment of either the buildings’ heritage status or the development proposal.
“It’s these hidden gems that are so hard to save,” says Quint. “We’re hoping that the company behind the development may accept the significance of the theatre and actually modify the development. The facade could be kept – it could be the entrance to the new hotel, who knows. And the theatre upstairs – hopefully that could be restored.”
