The old alleys of St Peter Port #9

This is another alley/flight of steps with plenty of memories.
At the end of the granite wall is a concrete wall which now blocks the way through but until the 1970s Guernsey's Little Theatre was through there. I suppose it was called the Little Theatre because it was small but back when I was a child I thought it was enormous. Every year on one of the days after Christmas we would go to the annual pantomime which was (and still is today) a local adaptation of one of the traditional pantomimes, with the characters and place names becoming local and with topical local jokes; much fun being poked at local politicians, though I think most of that went straight over my head in those days. It used to be a wonderful night out and I remember that I always wondered how the children dancing in the chorus line managed to stay awake night after night since I was sometimes struggling not to fall asleep. We used to walk there and back and call in at the Arsenal Chippy for a bag of chips to eat on the way home. Well it was a good way to warm your hands up.

When I was around 13 or 14 the Swimming Club crowd who hung out at the bathing pools all summer decided to have a youth club on Friday evenings in winter and these were held in the rooms underneath the Little Theatre, accessed via the stage door which is just out of sight on the left of this pic. By then I had a bike but getting there and back involved carrying my bike down and back up the long flight of steps which is out of view here. The alternate was a fairly long diversion around to the market to come to the bottom of these steps. We were fit in those days.

In the early 1980s, the theatre which had fallen into disrepair, burnt down in somewhat suspicious circumstances. It was owned by a friend of mine who had been trying to get planning permission which was proving difficult. An ultra modern house is now on the old site but building it was a logistic nightmare because there is no sensible access.

The blue door has no significance, I just thought that since it was there it added some interest to leave it blue...