Frank Matcham - biography

Frank Matcham was a famous English theatrical architect. Matcham and two architects he helped to train, Bertie Crewe and W.G.R. Sprague, were together responsible for the majority - certainly more than 200 - of the theatres and variety palaces of the great building boom which took place in Britain between about 1890 and 1915, peaking at the turn of the century. Matcham himself designed: The interior of the Theatre Royal, Newcastle; Cheltenham Everyman Theatre (1891); the Blackpool Grand Theatre, the Wakefield Theatre Royal and Opera House and the Buxton Opera House (1894); the Royal Hall (Kursaal) in Harrogate (1903); and the Liverpool Olympia (1905). He also designed several famous London theatres: the Hackney Empire (1901); the London Coliseum (1904); the London Palladium (1910); the Victoria Palace (1911). Matcham is remembered in Northern Ireland for his design of the Grand Opera House (opened December 1895) on Great Victoria Street, Belfast. In Douglas, Isle of Man he designed the Gaiety Theatre, which survives to this day.