NecroReview: 1009202 Hangar / Andrews Lane Theatre, Andrews Lane

As I write this, its pretty close to Halloween (yes, the post are currently scheduled that far in advance) so what better time to get vaguely spooky, and follow up my RetroReview series of pubs I visited (for the first time) pre-July 2016 by filling in the gaps I left.

These gaps were left because the premise was closed by the time it came to do the RetroReview - properly closed, not temporarily closed. I did start the RetroReview series during the pandemic after all, when they were all shut.

As before, this is in licence number order, ish - I managed to leave some out, often by de-scheduling a post to replace it with something more important and only realising later - and the first licence up is the former Andrews Lane Theatre on, well, Andrews Lane.

As a theatre-class licence, I can be fairly certain that the hotel that replaced it, 1018129 The Wren is not using a conversion of this licence.

The initial theatre opened in a converted building on the site in 1989, but was sold to developers and closed in 2007. However, like a lot of things sold for development from 2006 onwards; it didn't get redeveloped for quite some time; and the theatre, minus its seating, became a nightclub for the interim.

I'm pretty certain I did attend a play here in school - I had some teachers very in to theatre and I also attended a play in the Riverbank Theatre, now the Merchants Quay Night Cafe; but I didn't drink here until it was a nightclub unsurprisingly. As ALT until 2014, and latterly as Hangar, it survived until 2018 as a club until the demolition crews finally came.

I never particularly cared for it as a club venue; but at the time I was attending Dublin had so many, many more club venues - a lot of this series is going to be a series of the lost clubs of Dublin.

The building was in extremely poor condition, the two rooms didn't work from a sound separation perspective, the cloakroom was a mess and and the toilets were a problem. But I'd prefer we still had the space even with all that. May have been a dump but it was *our* dump, etc etc...