Take your seats for historic Tyne Theatre restoration

Tyne Theatre's gallery restoration involves selling off the old seating

Take your seats - literally. The historic Tyne Theatre and Opera House in Newcastle upon Tyne - in the top four per cent of important listed buildings in the whole of England - is restoring its gallery tier, and theatre lovers are being offered the current seating for a donation of £25 per seat.

Tyne Theatre and Opera House CEO Jonathan Higgins said “Our audiences are the heart and soul of our heritage venue and we wanted to be able to offer the opportunity for them to own a unique piece of our history while supporting its future.”

Alongside the money raised by the theatre's preservation trust, the project has been made possible by £247,500 from the National Lottery Heritage Fund. The work will be carried out this summer and will restore the traditional sightlines in the theatre gallery to improve comfort and views.

Project director David Wilmore explained: “Restoration of the Tyne Theatre gallery is the start of an ambitious project to fully restore the whole site, sympathetically, but also catering for 21st Century comfort.”

The theatre is a Grade One listed building, rated in the top four per cent of listed buildings by English Heritage, and it has the highest three-star rating from the Theatres Trust. It was designed by the Newcastle architecture practice of William Parnell and opened in 1867.

One of only eight Grade One listed original theatres in Great Britain, the theatre is also the only one that dates to the Victorian period. The north part of the building is located within the boundary of the Hadrian's Wall World Heritage Site.

The theatre is run by an independent limited company and is a charity: all funds raised are used to preserve the building.

*The theatre suffered a break-in at its recently opened cafe bar at the weekend (June 21), with hundreds of pounds worth of stock stolen. Local police later arrested two men.

The venue said it was “devastated” by the incident, with its chief executive warning that the grade I-listed theatre would suffer financially as the cafe would remain closed until repairs could be completed.

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