For twenty-three years the Vaudette ran twice-nightly variety: singers, comics, acrobats, a resident eight-piece in the pit and a chorus that rehearsed on the same maple floor people now dance on. The bill changed every Monday and the poster went up on the Saturday before, printed two streets away by a jobbing letterpress firm on Gibbet Street. Three of those posters survive. They are framed in the foyer, and if you have ever wondered why this website looks the way it does, they are the answer — the double rules, the wall of capitals, the little boxed imprint line along the top. We did not invent any of it. We copied it off our own wall.

The talkies arrived in 1931 and the Vaudette became the Regal Cinema, which is when the stage was boarded over and the orchestra pit filled with concrete. Bingo took the lease in 1968 and did the thing that accidentally saved the building: rather than strip the plasterwork out, they hung a false ceiling below it and forgot about it for twenty-six years. The hall closed in 1994 with a roof that had been patched rather than repaired since the war. It then stood empty for eighteen years, on the at-risk register for eleven of them, while three separate schemes to turn it into flats came and went.

A community trust bought the freehold in 2010 for a pound and a legal obligation to make it wind and watertight within three years. The roof came first and took most of the money. Four hundred bingo chairs went to a theatre in Keighley. When the false ceiling came down in the March of 2011 the entire proscenium was still there above it — the lyre, the cartouche, the egg-and-dart, all of it filthy and none of it broken. We cleaned it and left it alone. The gilt you can see from the stalls is original and unrestored, because it is the colour a hundred and eighteen years actually makes and no paint chart has it. The maple came up, was re-sprung, and went back down in the same order it came out.