When the Plaza was in its heyday in the mid-1930s, one corner of its tea room would find brewer and one-day knight of the realm John Robinson, of Stockport’s most famous family, installed there most days. He would take his regular table, the one nearest the front doors to the left, with the view over the square.
Remarkably, his experience there - from the monogram crockery to the art deco wall sconces - is much the same then as it is now, some 90 years later.
The Plaza began its restoration, with grants from the Heritage Lottery Fund and various other benevolent organisations, in 2009. At one time, in the late 90s, it came very close to being demolished.
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Upstairs from the auditorium of the ‘super cinema and variety theatre’, the tea room’s windows had been boarded up since 1967, from back when it was a Mecca bingo hall. A fire in the 70s had also damaged a large part of the room’s ornate ceiling.
General manager Ted Doan says he cried when the boards were finally taken down, and light flooded into the room again, the view over Mersey Square restored after decades in the dark. Ted is a devoted, protective custodian of the building. He lives and breathes it. He refers to it as ‘her’, and could talk about it for hours and hours on end.
“It was the era of Tutankamun,” says Ted. “This was meant to be an Egyptianate, Mediterranean palace. What we did during the restoration was make sure that everything was restored to how it would have been on her opening day. All of the paintwork, the plasterwork, everything.”
Archive glass plate pictures of the theatre on opening day were used to bring the place back to its former glory. The pictures were carefully studied, so that facsimiles of the original lighting could be made and reinstalled.
Lloyd Loom, who made the original seating, manufactured some of its Henley chairs especially. They even sprayed them in a colour that they had stopped using in the 1950s.
“The building, she does tell you how to do things,” he goes on. “For example, one of the wall sconces behind the plasterboards was still in place. So we were able to replicate it, and do so all the way along the wall.
All of the paintwork, we found parts of the original work, so would send those off for sampling and get the exact colours. The carpet, we had images of what it looked like.
“We found one single hatstand, so one of our volunteers, who is a master craftsman, recreated more of them.”
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Continuity is at the heart of the Plaza. On the ceiling, the swirl patterns in the plaster go one way in one panel, and travel back the other way on the next, exactly as they did in the original pictures. Due to the position from which the old plate pictures were taken, restorers used the reflection in a mirror to replicate features at the other end of the room.
You will not find a single crosshead screw in any of the fixtures. Though they were invented in 1932, the same year the Plaza was built, they would not have crossed the Atlantic by then, and so they weren’t used in the restoration.
The restaurant’s menu is old fashioned too. There’s a bacon sandwich, which the tea room was reputedly famous for when it first opened. It offers a champagne afternoon tea. A panini is probably just about as modern as things get.
The afternoon tea itself? Well, it’s probably politest to call it traditional. There are sandwiches with the crusts cut off, the roast beef is well done and there’s a clump of superfluous salad. There are warm scones with jam and clotted cream, and little squares of cake. The tea is the Plaza’s own blend, and it’s all delivered on the handsome monogrammed crockery.
It shan’t be winning any particular prizes for innovation. There are no colourful macarons, no miniature sourdough crumpets, no cleverly rethought takes on the scotch egg. The innovation that has taken place in the restoration of this treasured building is truly inspiring, and it would be a joy to see that replicated in the food. The menu needs perhaps more than a few tweaks to drag it kicking and screaming into the 20th century, let alone the 21st.
But still, it somehow doesn’t dampen the experience. The staff wear black and white, all dickie bows and waistcoats. The music is 30s ragtime, and the hot water for the teapots comes from a giant boiling hot contraption behind the old bar.
“I think the wonderful thing about the Plaza is that I’ve never worked in a venue that is so much at the heart of the community,” Ted says. “And I mean it really is in people’s hearts. And that’s wonderful.”
Sitting in the tea room at the Plaza is to go back in time. What has been achieved here is quite magnificent. Its architect, William Thornley, who submitted his plans to build a cinema, theatre, cafe restaurant, billiard hall and motor garage on the site in 1929, would surely beam with pride.
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