Fairfield Hall

Fairfield Halls
Fairfield Halls as seen from Queen's Gardens
General information
Type	Concert hall
Architectural style	Modernist
Address	Park Lane, Croydon CR9
Country	United Kingdom
Inaugurated	1962
Client	County Borough of Croydon
Design and construction
Architect	Robert Atkinson and Partners

Fairfield Halls is an arts, entertainment and conference centre located in Croydon, London. It opened in 1962 and contains a concert hall, theatre and gallery. The large concert hall is 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.

The 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 (see below). It contains 2,000 digitised images accessed via text and keyword searches. This makes it one of the largest digitised venue archives in Europe.

Fairfield was run from 1993 to 2016 by a self-financing charity with a board of trustees. The charity was in receipt of an operating grant from Croydon Council; it was placed into administration in July 2016.

In the summer of 2014 the council paid for the refurbishment of the Arnhem Gallery, the conversion of the former 'Green Room' into the New Studio and the installation of the latest digital projection equipment with Dolby Surround 7.1 in the Concert Hall.

Croydon Council, the freeholder of the land, has had various plans to refurbish Fairfield over the years but none of these plans has ever come to fruition. In the spring of 2015 a new set of consultants led by Croydon firm Mott MacDonald was appointed by Croydon Council to deliver a £12m programme on the Fairfield Halls and a separate programme for the remainder of the 'College Green' site. Around £30m will be spent on redeveloping and modernising Fairfield Halls in the period between 2016 and 2018.