In the town where I live, Thornbury, there is a theatre called the Armstrong Hall. As the UK went into lockdown in March 2020, the Armstrong was running shows one day and closed the next. The staff were let go almost overnight. The doors were locked. They stayed locked for more than four years.
A community campaign has fought to bring it back. After a long stretch of getting nowhere, they secured a generous benefactor last year, and the renovation plans are now moving forward. Sometime soon the building will be opened up, refurbished, and parts of it possibly rebuilt. What it currently looks like inside, frozen at the exact moment of its closure, will be gone.
I wanted to go in and photograph it before that happened. Late last year I got the access, and went in for an afternoon with a Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 and 24 sheets of Ilford FP4. This is the shoot diary, and the photographs are an attempt at a permanent record of a building at a very specific moment in time.
What makes this place different from a usual abandoned building
When I say “abandoned theatre” most people imagine the kind of place urbex photographers explore: peeling paint, collapsing ceilings, decades of decay. The Armstrong Hall is not that. It has been maintained from the outside by people in the community who refused to let it fall apart. The structure is sound.
What it is, inside, is a building stopped mid-sentence.
The bar has half-full bottles still on the back shelves. There is change in the till. The office has someone’s coat hanging on a hook and a hat on the desk. Papers are sitting in neat piles, waiting for attention on a tomorrow that never came. The dressing rooms have an ironing board still set up and clothes hanging on a rail, exactly as the last performer left them in March 2020.
It is not a place falling apart. It is a place that quietly stopped, with everyone expecting to be back the following week, and never came back.
That is the atmosphere I wanted to photograph.
![PLACEHOLDER: the bar from the corner, showing the half-full bottles and the till exactly as left]
The kit and the approach
Stenopeika Air Force 4x5 with a standard lens. Tripod-mounted throughout. I wanted to work slow and deliberate, with movements available if I needed to correct verticals, which in a building like this you almost always do.
Ilford FP4 Plus, 24 sheets of it. Black and white was the right choice here for two reasons. First, the building has its own muted palette already, and colour would have fought it rather than supporting it. Second, my plan is to print these in the darkroom and the FP4 negatives are what I trust most for that workflow.
Closed-down apertures, mostly f32 to f45. I usually shoot large format wide open or close to it for the shallow depth-of-field look, but for this shoot I wanted everything sharp from foreground to background, so the eye could move around the frame and read every detail. That meant long exposures, often several seconds at a time. The building is not moving and neither am I, so the exposures were fine.
Slightly higher than normal eye level. I deliberately set the tripod up a bit taller than usual, putting the camera at standing-just-on-tiptoe height rather than my normal eye level. I wanted the photographs to feel like a sneak-peek, as if the viewer was looking over the threshold of a room they were not quite supposed to enter. That voyeur quality felt right for the subject matter. These spaces have been off-limits for four years. The photographs should acknowledge that.
![PLACEHOLDER: the Armstrong Hall main auditorium from the corner, showing the seating and the stage]
Working through the building
I went through the building room by room, with my notes for each space.
Outside. Started with the front of the building, the visible bit that everyone in town walks past. Small tilt on the front standard to correct the verticals. A reminder of what the building is from the street level.
Entrance lobby. Landscape orientation, capturing the width of the foyer and the doors leading further in. The carpet is worn in patterns that show four years of nobody being there.
The bar. The room I had been most looking forward to. Landscape framing, deliberately wide, with the bottles, the optics, the back shelves, and a single original light fitting at f3.4 to keep a sense of the room’s mood. Exposure several seconds. Everything in place, exactly as it was on closing day.
The office. Stopped down to f45 for maximum depth of field, focused on the middle of the room. The camera raised slightly higher than usual to give the sneak-peek quality. Long exposure. The papers and the coat and the hat are all in the frame, all readable, all from a specific moment in time.
The Cotswold Hall. One of the performance spaces. Less personal than the bar or the office, but still arresting because of its emptiness.
The Armstrong Hall itself. The main auditorium. Opened up to f4 for this one because I wanted some atmosphere rather than clinical clarity, and the depth of field at large format with a wide aperture still gives me enough of the frame in focus to read the room.
Backstage dressing rooms. This was the one that genuinely stopped me. Ironing board still up. Clothes still hanging. The light coming through the small dressing-room window catching the fabric. Hand-timed five seconds. Maybe my favourite frame from the day.
The wings of the stage. Where actors would have stood ready to go on. Empty for four years. Hand-timed long exposure to capture the depth into the dim corners.
![PLACEHOLDER: the dressing room, with the ironing board and the hanging clothes, the favourite frame from the shoot]
What I want to do with these negatives
The plan is to print them properly. Big prints, 10x12 inches or larger, on fibre paper in the darkroom. At that scale the details that make these photographs work become readable: the writing on a notice board, the labels on the bar bottles, the breaking-up of the floor in the main hall, the small signs everywhere that this was a real working space that one day stopped being one.
When I have the prints, the plan is to give them to the people leading the renovation. If the prints are good enough, and if they want to, I would love for them to be hung on the walls of the new Armstrong Hall when it reopens. So that future audiences walking in to see a show have a moment with what the building was, and what it went through, before they take their seats.
That is the long-term ambition. Whether it lands or not, the negatives themselves are now a record of a moment, and the moment will not be there much longer.
Why this kind of project matters
There are bigger stories of lockdown than the Armstrong Hall. Far bigger. People lost their lives. People lost their loved ones. Industries collapsed. Whole ways of living changed.
But the smaller stories are also worth keeping. A community theatre that closed overnight, sat empty for four years, and is now being brought back, is the kind of story that does not get a documentary made about it. It is local, specific, modestly important. The kind of thing that disappears unless somebody decides to point a camera at it.
The Armstrong is going to be alive again, hopefully soon, and the photographs from the renovation and the reopening will tell that story. These photographs, the ones from this shoot, hold the bit in the middle. The bit that nobody saw for four years. The pause between the closing day and the reopening day.
Big thanks to the group of people in Thornbury who have campaigned to keep this building alive, and to the people who let me in to photograph it. More details on the Armstrong and the renovation plans at thearmstrong.co.uk.