255 Oldham Road, Manchester. I photographed it over one morning in April 2009, before it came down.
It opened in 1896 as the Royal Osborne Theatre - a Victorian variety house, three thousand seats, on a road that had never had one. It became a cinema, burned in 1958, was rebuilt and spent the seventies as a roller disco. On 7 February 1980 it held a Factory benefit for the City Fun fanzine: Joy Division played it three months before Ian Curtis died, supported by A Certain Ratio and Section 25, with Jon Savage on the decks. The Cure played there that April. And at the end of the decade it became the Thunderdome - the acid house club that was everything the Haçienda wasn't. Edgier, cheaper, no dress code and no pretence, the club the gangs and the football firms and half of Madchester actually went to. I was one of them, around 1989, long before I do what I do now for a living.
None of that saved it. The Haçienda got the film and the plaque. This building got the wrecking ball, and the story it belongs to has mostly declined to mention it. By 2009 it was a derelict shell, and these are among the last photographs of it before it went to rubble and the corner went to grass. A place that was, for a hundred years, somebody's house. Photographed on the way to being no one's.
