THOSE of us who so dearly love Southend have been shocked and saddened by the arson attack this week on the old theatre building in Alexandra Street, known in recent years as the New Empire.

Part of the auditorium, a survivor from a long ago time, is reported to have been wrecked in the fire.

And this, to me, adds even more to the sorrow and anger felt by those of us who knew the building from the long ago, when it was part of the old Southend we loved and whose demise rouses our anger.

This writer – and fellow seniors – knew it as the Rivoli, its name from 1920 until it became the ABC in 1961.

Perhaps history should have warned us of dangers ahead, because the building, which began life as the Public Hall in 1872, burned down in 1895 and had to be rebuilt.

I went to the Rivoli many times, before it became just one of the countless victims of change in the Sixties.

That was the decade when so much around us and so much about us underwent dramatic and extensive alterations and so-called facelifts. When the straight-faced, strait-laced attitudes and class distinctions of the Victorians gave way to seemingly unbelievable and widely welcomed changes in our way of life.

Suddenly, we were freed from outdated, outmoded rules and regulations and attitudes that had long divided our society into Them and Us. It was refreshingly wonderful, for many reasons.

And yet, in sweeping aside Victoriana and moving into a freer, fairer, less divisive way of life, we also too readily and easily swept away our Victorian building heritage and, also, much of what immediately followed that period in history.

Through the decades that followed, much of the Southend many of us grew up to know and readily recognise and love, left to us and for us by those of that earlier age, began to disappear – to be erased or, in some cases, changed beyond recognition.

We know, for sure and with understanding, that times and attitudes and ideas and tastes continue to change.

And must do so.

Those of us long in the tooth know that very much has changed very much for the better in our lifetime.

Yet we can’t help missing much that has gone before, especially in the loss of buildings and institutions that have found firm place in our memories – and, yes, sometimes in our hearts, too.

Some cruel, callous, thoughtless, mindless individual or group has prompted these thoughts today by deliberately and cruelly torching the former New Empire, previously Rivoli, theatre in Southend’s Alexandra Street, right opposite where, until the Sixties, stood the town’s police station and courtrooms.

Thank goodness us lovers of Southend, still have one, famous, muchloved survivor of yesteryear for which to wish a long and much, much happier future. That’s our pier, of course.