Inside the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith: London's Art Deco Picture Palace

I have walked past the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith more times than I can count, almost always in the rain, almost always on the way to somewhere else, and for years I had it filed in my head as a big beige box marooned on a roundabout. Then I went to a show there on a January evening, arrived early enough to actually look up, and realised I had been hurrying past one of the finest interiors in west London without ever going in.

It is a 1932 picture palace that has spent ninety odd years pretending to be a music venue, and the moment you get through the doors it stops pretending. This is what I found.

Arriving at the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith After Dark

The building sits at 45 Queen Caroline Street, wedged between the gyratory and the river, and by day it is genuinely easy to overlook. The frontage is a long, shallow curve of pale stone with tall fluted bays running up it, more ocean liner than theatre, and in daylight it reads as somewhere you might renew a parking permit.

At night it does something else entirely. The whole facade is washed in colour by LED lighting that was added during the last big refurbishment, and on the evening I went it was running through a slow rainbow gradient, so the stone shifted from violet to blue to acid green while the queue shuffled forward underneath it. People were lined up along the box office windows with their coats zipped to the chin, and every few seconds someone would step back into the road to photograph the building, which is exactly what I did too.

The scale only makes sense once you are standing under it. This was built to swallow three and a half thousand people at a time, in an age when going to the pictures was the main event of the week, and the frontage is sized for that kind of crowd rather than for a modest queue on a Thursday.

From Gaumont Palace to Odeon to Apollo

The Apollo opened on 28 March 1932 as the Gaumont Palace, designed by the theatre architect Robert Cromie, who had already worked on the Prince of Wales Theatre. It opened as a cinema with a stage attached: 3,487 seats, a stage 35 feet deep and twenty dressing rooms, which is a lot of dressing rooms for a building whose main business was showing films.

That stage is the reason the place survived. When cinema audiences fell away, the building had the bones to become a concert hall, and it has been renamed roughly every decade since. It was the Gaumont Palace until 1962, the Hammersmith Odeon from 1962 to 1993, then Labatt's Apollo, then Carling Apollo, then HMV Apollo, and since 2013 the Eventim Apollo. Everyone I know over the age of forty still calls it the Hammersmith Odeon, and honestly so does the ticket in my head.

The list of nights that happened inside this room is absurd. The Beatles played their Christmas shows here. Bob Marley and the Rolling Stones played here. Motorhead recorded a live album whose title made the place a punchline and a pilgrimage site at the same time. And on 3 July 1973, on this stage, David Bowie announced that it was the last show Ziggy Stardust would ever do, to an audience who had no idea it was coming. The BBC has filmed its stand up series here for years, which is why the auditorium looks oddly familiar the first time you sit down in it.

The building's importance was recognised late. It was listed Grade II in 1990 and upgraded to Grade II* in 2005, which puts it in the top few per cent of listed buildings in the country.

The Foyer Is the Part Nobody Photographs

Here is my actual advice: buy a ticket for anything, arrive forty minutes early, and spend that time in the foyer rather than at the bar queue on the ground floor. The entrance hall runs up in a wide flight of stairs under a sign for the circle bar, and the whole stairwell is done in pale green and cream plasterwork with stepped, geometric detailing on every corner and doorframe. It is the softest possible version of art deco, the kind that was meant to feel luxurious to people who had queued in the cold, and it still works on exactly that level.

Look up on the landing and the ceiling opens into a huge fan, a series of fluted ribs radiating out from a squared-off boss with a pierced geometric grille at its centre. The lighting picks it out in warm orange, so it glows like the inside of a shell while a few hundred people stand underneath it holding pints and not looking at it. There are matching grilles set into the walls, tall windows with leaded geometric glazing, and a tiered chandelier that steps down in stages like a small illuminated ziggurat.

Most of what you are looking at is original, cleaned up rather than replaced. The building went through a multi-million-pound restoration under joint ownership from 2012, with architects Foster Wilson working on the 1932 scheme: plasterwork repaired, the staircases brought back, the facade lighting added, and the whole thing reopened in September 2013. It is a rare case of a venue refurbishment that made the building look more like itself rather than less.

If you like this sort of thing, London is full of interiors that hide behind ordinary doors. The Maughan Library's Round Reading Room and the Nash terrace at the British Academy are the same kind of surprise, except those only open to the public for a weekend a year. The Apollo will sell you the experience any night there is a show on.

The Auditorium, and the Organ Hiding Under the Stage

The auditorium is enormous and surprisingly intimate at the same time, which is a trick of the way the circle is pushed forward over the stalls. The ceiling is the best bit: a great rippling shell of concentric plaster bands with a lit centre, so it looks like water seen from underneath. Down the side walls there are tall grilled bays and scalloped niches that were designed to conceal the organ chambers and the ventilation, and above the stage the lighting rig hangs off a truss that crosses the whole opening.

Since 2003 the stalls seats have been removable, which is why capacity is quoted two different ways: about 5,039 standing, or 3,632 with every seat reserved. It makes a real difference to the night. Standing, it feels like a big club with a very ornate lid on it. Seated, it feels like a proper old theatre, and you notice the ceiling much more.

The thing almost nobody in the room knows about is the organ. A Compton theatre organ with a four-manual console and somewhere around 1,200 pipes was installed with the building in 1932, played between films, and then fell silent. It was disconnected and stored away, and the pipes sat unheard for roughly a quarter of a century before it was reinstated in the mid 2000s and brought back into playing condition. There is an entire second instrument built into the fabric of the room, and most audiences walk out having never heard it.

What a Night at the Eventim Apollo Hammersmith Is Actually Like

Practical impressions, in no particular order. The bars on the circle level are calmer than the ground floor ones and have the better view, so go up as soon as you are through the doors. The cloakroom queue is worst in the fifteen minutes before doors close, and almost nonexistent if you arrive early. Sightlines in the circle are good almost everywhere, and the front of the circle is arguably the best seat in the building because you are level with the top of the proscenium and can see the ceiling and the stage at once.

The sound is warm rather than clinical, which suits comedy and anything guitar-shaped, and is slightly generous with bass at the back of the stalls. The room holds a crowd's noise beautifully, so a big laugh or a singalong sounds enormous, which is presumably why the BBC has kept filming here.

Afterwards, five thousand people leave through one frontage onto a road with a gyratory on it, and the walk back to the station takes about ten minutes with the crowd rather than the four minutes it takes in daylight. If you would rather not be part of that, the riverside pubs on Lower Mall are a five-minute walk in the other direction and are a much nicer place to wait it out.

Visiting the Eventim Apollo: Getting There and Practical Notes

Address: 45 Queen Caroline Street, Hammersmith, London W6 9QH.

Getting there: Hammersmith station is a three- to five-minute walk, and is served by the District, Piccadilly, Circle and Hammersmith and City lines, which is an unusually generous set of options for a venue this size. Plenty of buses stop at the Hammersmith bus station next door. Driving is a bad idea: the gyratory is unforgiving, and parking near the venue is limited and expensive.

Tickets and timings: doors are usually around 7 pm for a 7.30 pm or 8 pm start, and the building genuinely rewards turning up at the start of that window rather than the end of it. Tickets go through the venue's own site and the usual agents, and the seated versus standing configuration changes from show to show, so check which one you are buying before you assume there will be a seat.

Best time to go: any show at all, though a seated night gives you more time to look at the room. If you want to see the foyer properly, aim for a weekday show rather than a sold-out weekend one, when the crowd is thinner, and you can actually stand still on the stairs.

Nearby: the Lyric Hammersmith and Riverside Studios are both within a few minutes' walk, and the stretch of river at Lower Mall, with the Dove and the Blue Anchor on it, is one of the prettiest bits of the Thames in west London. Make an evening of it rather than arriving at 7.29 pm, which is what I did for years. For more London buildings worth getting inside, there is also the Law Society's hall on Chancery Lane.

The Eventim Apollo Hammersmith is not a museum and does not ask to be treated like one. It just quietly happens to be one of the best preserved 1930s cinema interiors in the country, and you can walk into it for the price of a gig ticket.

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All photos were taken by Ina/WithinLondon, unless stated otherwise.