With a history that dates back over 300 years, five previous theatre buildings have also carried the name Sadler’s Wells and occupied the site since 1683. The present building opened in 1998 and was one of the first arts buildings to receive National Lottery funding. After 15 years of high traffic along with the advancement of new low energy technologies, Sadler’s Wells needed a refresh to maintain its position as London’s International dance house. The refurbishment increases the theatre’s visibility and reveals a renewed interior as part of a strategy that enhances the journey from pavement to auditorium with a newly transformed foyer to prepare visitors for the experience that awaits them. Work undertaken includes the addition of a new internally lit portal, framing a redesigned entrance, making intelligent yet subtle changes to interior spaces as well as bringing in new energy saving measures alongside a new lighting design strategy. The project at Sadler’s Wells covered a range of important improvements to the buildings and their infrastructure resulting in greater resilience of all systems. The project objectives were to ensure that the organisation, its buildings and equipment were: • made resilient and able to continue to operate at full capacity • energy efficient and environmentally sustainable • improved to ensure optimal accessibility and visitor experience Enhancing the visitor experience is our key to this project and we see this starting the moment visitors get out of the tube at Angel, bus on the street or walk-up the road. The street is very much an extension of the theatre foyer which should act to prepare the visitor for the magic of the main dance event and then enable a similar decompression in returning the audience back to the street. That is to say that the ‘half-life’ of the visitor experience within the auditorium should be prolonged as far as possible by the mood and comfort of the foyer space. We are very conscious that Sadler’s Wells is a much loved and established brand and our approach is not one seeking to challenge this, but rather one which aims to enhance the brand values and refresh the front of house environment with often subtle ‘fine tuning’ to provide improved visual clarity, unifying programmatic separate zones, while allowing these to individually have greater identity. We have stripped back all of the red to only the exterior and interior of the main auditorium, signified by a new luminous entrance portal, as part of a clearer brand identity. An enhanced tonal range is employed to establish various thresholds between arrival, the bars and auditorium, adjusting the visitors mood and eyes to the black interior of the auditorium in anticipation of the vibrant performance about to be experienced. A new continuous 70m long ‘ribbon of light’ wraps along the edge of the main sculptural stair dominating the atrium void, lifting this heavy element which now appears to dance in the space while animating what we refer to as Sadler’s Wells ‘Civic Window of Light’ to the street.