Waikato Times: Keeping the Hamilton Hotel façade for Waikato Regional Theatre - Token gesture or triumph?

Originally published in Waikato Times, Saturday 12 April 2025.

By Dr Richard Swainson.

The remains of the old Hamilton Hotel have been ‘spruced up to a standard that would challenge living memory to accurately recall’. PHOTO: Christel Yardley / WAIKATO TIMES.

Dr Richard Swainson runs Hamilton's last DVD rental store and is a weekly contributor to the Waikato Times history page.

OPINION: The headline read Theatre façade gets the tick. A Waikato Times vox pop recorded reactions to progress on the edifice that dominates the south end of Hamilton's Victoria St. After what has seemed an interminable period of building behind scaffolding the Waikato Regional Theatre, like a debutante's décolletage at a more liberal coming out ball, has revealed an enticing smattering of plaster. What remains of the old Hamilton Hotel, spruced up to a standard that would challenge living memory to accurately recall, has again seen the light of day.

As the article reveals, without recourse to innuendo or an obvious drug gag, the restoration process rejoices in the moniker of "crack injection". Masonry has been stabilised, original flaws retained, the climactic reveal truly a seminal moment in the aesthetics of the city, albeit with further cracks to be injected around the corner, on the Sapper Moore-Jones Place side.

Near the new theatre is the statue of Sapper Horace Moore-Jones, ‘as if painting the site of his tragic 1922 demise’. PHOTO: Christel Yardley / WAIKATO TIMES.

Inspired by the catalogue of compliments quoted, I determined to take a look for myself. Was it coincidence or kismet on that Monday night stroll I happened upon a doyen of Hamilton dramatics, a veteran director of the old Left Bank Theatre, which once operated out of facilities adjacent to the Hamilton Hotel, ones built to house staff? I wondered what he thought of the façade. Was he excited by the prospect of the new theatre or did he mourn the demise of his old stomping ground? Not mutually exclusive reactions, of course. Alas, I was too discreet to ask.

When across the road from the façade two stationary figures were apparent, at effective book-ends. South lay the statue of Horace Moore-Jones, posed as he might have appeared on the Gallipoli peninsula, as if painting the site of his tragic 1922 demise. Ironically, given the World War I artist met his maker as a consequence of assisting others during the fire that destroyed the previous iteration, Moore-Jones never himself cast eyes upon that particular Hamilton Hotel.

Hamilton Hotel ablaze in 1922. PHOTO: Hamilton Library.

At the northern end, sitting on a director's chair, smoking a cigarette, was one of the city's most distinctive street persons. If slightly more animated than the statue, his intense gaze gave no more away. Was he mesmerised or appalled by the façade, or merely indifferent? Judging by his age he could potentially recall a Hamilton Hotel before the Left Bank era, pre-1980, when the facilities were still accommodating guests. I doubt he is sufficiently seasoned to remember the place's most prestigious guest, Elizabeth II, but possibly his parents were witness to events surrounding that December, 1953 stay. If you were alive and a Hamilton resident at that time you can probably still point to the spot on Victoria St where you stood during the royal procession.

A decade ago, during the ceremony which unveiled the Moore-Jones statue, my friend Bill McArthur, speaking on behalf of the Theatre of the Impossible Trust, did just that, helping to locate the new addition to the Victoria St landscape in the context of city history.

The question that I lacked the courage to ask any of the above is whether the façade is itself a tribute to and recognition of that history or a sleight-of-hand, a facsimile of the past utilising actual elements, the equivalent of signage communicating the fact that a heritage building once stood on the spot but no longer does, like the plaque you can see in Hamilton East marking the site of the old Riverina Hotel.

The old Hamilton Hotel façade back in 2017. PHOTO: Tom Lee / WAIKATO TIMES.

Some architects and heritage experts have significant issues with facadism. One was Warwick Kellaway, whose obituary I wrote late last year. Another is Ann McEwan, a former Waikato Times contributor. Back in 2021, she told the paper that "facadism...turns heritage buildings into streetscape, into scenery", arguing that "...heritage buildings are about the embodied life of the people who built them, lived in them, visited them". "The Queen didn't stay in the façade of Hamilton Hotel, she stayed in the Hotel", said Ann, with more eloquence than the likes of myself can muster, "so if you destroy the contents of that façade, you are almost entirely obliterating the heritage value of the building".

I can well imagine that a quarter way through the 21st century, with memories of Elizabeth II fast fading and cultural and ideological predispositions more inclined to critique and distance us from the colonial legacy than celebrate events that might seem at best quaint, such an example cuts little ice. What matter the nostalgic reveries of the few remaining royalists next to the demands of present day theatre audiences and a thirst for touring shows? Better to cut the apron strings.

The Queen’s 1953 visit to Hamilton features in this edition of the Waikato Times. PHOTO: WAIKATO TIMES.

Why then preserve even a façade? Those against facadism tend to be all-or-nothing type folk. If you cannot save the whole kit and caboodle you bowl the lot and start again. It's the attitude that has informed the demolition of almost every other past Hamilton theatre, be they located on Victoria St or elsewhere. Names like The Civic, the Theatre Royal/The Embassy, The Regent and the Founders Theatre, with the old State/Carlton a partial exception, unrecognisable in its restructure.

After years of bleating about the injustice of such things I'm prepared to concede that there simply was neither the commercial nor the political will to value and retain buildings that in their day so enriched the lives of Hamiltonians. We are a new society that has yet to learn the lessons of say Europe, where structures can be preserved for over a millennia. With an almost negligible threat of earthquakes this too could be Hamilton's reality but only if we want it. And for the moment - as throughout the latter half of last century - we certainly do not.

Given this, why not retain a vestige? With the partial exception of the Riff Raff statue, which once stood in campy remembrance of The Embassy, no markers recognise those theatres past. Gazing up at a facade at least gives a sense of what once was. With a little imagination you might even make out the great regal wave of '53.