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Fairfield Halls struggling to sell tickets for Culture opener

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Our veteran arts correspondent, BELLA BARTOCK, on the council-owned arts centre’s struggle to win back its old audiences

Cheap seats: the ENO performed to a full house at the Fairfield Halls, with tickets at a fiver each

There’s mounting, and justifiable, concern that the Fairfield Halls, despite the best-efforts of its new-ish operators, are failing to win back audiences for some of its most prestigious performances.

Tonight the council-owned arts centre is staging the second in a series of international orchestra concerts, with the Swedish Philharmonia on its first UK tour since the 2020 covid pandemic. But despite a raft of special offers on tickets, discounts and free tickets for (accompanied) under-18s, even free glasses of wine for concert-goers, the 1,600-seater auditorium is likely to be barely one-third full.

Last month Richard Morrison, The Times newspaper’s veteran classical music reviewer, visited Croydon for what ought to have been a crowd-pulling offering of the London Mozart Players accompanying “cellist superstar” Sheku Kanneh-Mason.

Morrison gave the performers, and the venue – “the best orchestral concert hall acoustic in Greater London” – glowing reviews. But he also wrote: “It must be noted that the hall was little more than a quarter full. Perhaps, like me, Croydon’s music lovers are still wondering if the venue is properly back in business.”

Cello superstar: when Sheku Kanneh-Mason played the Fairfield Halls last month, the place was three-quarters empty

Concert-goers who attended the more recent Armenian State Symphony Orchestra’s concert reported a similarly disappointing turn-out.

Judging from the Fairfield Halls’ own bookings pages, ticket sales for tonight’s gala event have also been poor. Tickets, priced from £28.40 up to £70, remain widely available. Only the central area of the stalls have limited availability. In the Upper Stalls, where there’s almost 400 seats, it is estimated that fewer than 50 tickets have sold. In the Balcony, by lunchtime today, just five tickets had sold.

And there’s a similar picture looking at ticket availability for Saturday’s Oratorio of Hope, the new work to be performed by the London Mozart Players in what is supposed to be the prestigious opening event of Croydon’s year as London’s Borough of Culture.

This will be a council-promoted event, with substantial numbers of complimentary tickets distributed, and which sees the main Stalls area largely spoken for. But with tickets offered on a “pay what you can afford” basis, with a suggested fee of just £5.50, virtually all the seats in the Upper Stalls remain available with just five days to go. The management’s not even bothered opening the Balcony area for this gig.

There are various theories about why the Fairfield Halls is struggling to sell out for so many classical performances. Morrison’s suggestion may well be valid: after the venue was closed for more than three years for its controversial refurbishment and then placed in a covid hibernation for two years, it is obviously slow going bringing back the venue’s previously loyal audiences.

Pricing appears to be an issue: when the English National Opera transferred its performance to the Halls after a cancellation elsewhere, they filled the auditorium with music lovers who enjoyed a bargain with tickets only £5 each.

Lack of car parking facilities was also been offered as a disincentive for visiting. Now that the underground car park has been belatedly re-opened, some concert-goers have found it hostile and off-putting, with reports of human faeces, rats and other unattractive discoveries.

The Halls have been operated since its reopening in 2019 by BHLive, who arrived in Croydon with little experience outside the management of swimming pools and leisure centres on the south coast. A spectacular bust-up with the ambitious artistic director, Neil Chandler, saw his departure within a few months of the re-opening.

Dotty: all the red dots for Saturday night’s Oratorio of Hope concert are the as-yet unsold tickets

Marketing the Halls appears to have been underpowered, while BHLive’s clunky website hardly makes it simple and easy for potential punters to purchase tickets. The operators might be offering free tickets for accompanied under-18s for tonight’s Swedish Philharmonia concert, for instance, but that’s not clear to visitors to the booking pages. The website appears to offer tickets for junior concert-goers at £42.50.

Local amateur choirs, orchestras and drama groups have also been deterred from taking their productions back to the Halls, put off by BHLive’s high hiring fees, and the difficulty in bringing back ticket-buying audiences to help defray such costs.

Such trends would be worrying enough for those who want to see the Fairfield Halls bustling again and being the beacon for the arts in south London that they once were. But with the venue’s owners, Croydon Council, still bankrupt and unlikely to have any cash to invest in the Halls for years to come, it becomes all the more important that the operators start to bring in close-to-capacity audiences.

Because now, having had £67million squandered on the Halls in an unfinished and incomplete refurbishment conducted by Brick by Brick, the improvement panel which is overseeing Croydon’s financial conduct is also watching very closely.

Watching: improvement panel chair Tony McArdle

Tony McArdle, the chair of the improvement panel, in his most recent letter to Levelling Up minister Michael Gove, wrote, “There is a concern that the full potential of Fairfield Halls is not yet being realised and further effort is required in marketing the venue to a wider potential audience.”

McArdle noted that initiatives “are currently being implemented”.

If McArdle and his colleagues have managed to score some freebies for tonight or, more likely, Saturday’s “Buwwa of Cultcha” spectacular, they might be asking some more questions about whether the Fairfield Halls is achieving its “full potential”.

Read more: Fairfield Halls offers some Easter movie magic for just £2


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