A FIRE at a derelict Darlington nightclub yesterday morning is likely to hasten its demolition.

Darlington council only bought the building in Commercial Street about a month ago with a view to demolishing it, but at midnight firefighters were called to a blaze.

Cllr Alan Marshall, the economy portfolio holder, said last night: “We’ve just been informed that the building has been the subject of an arson attack. We need to inspect the damage, and for health and safety reasons, it is imperative that we drop the building and make the area safe as soon as possible.”

Firefighters remained at the scene, behind the Northgate branch of Boots, until 4.30am on Tuesday.

The club closed about ten years ago when it was called Audio, although over the last 30 years, it has probably had more names than it has served drinks.

It opened in the late 1980s as Zhivagos upstairs with Lara’s Bar downstairs. Then it became Oscar’s and Emmy’s, then the Plastered Parrot, then The Lounge and Cactus Jack’s, then Mr Bojangles and finally Audio upstairs with Buffalo Joe’s downstairs.

There were probably some other names inbetween.

Each renaming came with a massive investment: it cost £500,000 to convert it into Audio in 2010; it took £1m to convert it from the Plastered Parrot into The Lounge in 2002; it had taken £1.5m to make it into Oscars in 1994, and it had opened as Zhivagos in 1988 after what was variously reported as a £1.2m or even a £2m investment.

Extraordinary sums have been thrown at a hideous building that for much of its life has been due for demolition. Only 20 years ago, The Oval was going to be an enormous extension of the Queen Street shopping centre, covering the Commercial Street car park and the nightclub, even bridging the ring-road.

Those plans never left the drawing board.

The building itself seems originally to have been the home of the Durlia Club, a club formed at the end of the First World War for former members of the Durham Light Infantry, and was built in the late 1970s. It was converted about 10 years later into Zhivagos nightclub.

Those were the days before all-day licensing, when Darlington had only three venues allowed to serve drinks until 2.30am: Zhivagos was licensed to hold 460 people, Club Lucy’s in East Street could take 300, and 1,100 were allowed in Mardi Gras in Gladstone Street – a club so big that it was opened in 1989 by Radio 1 DJ Bruno Brookes.

Zhivagos was run by an even bigger character: Tom Finnegan. Mr Finnegan had stood for the Conservatives in marginal Stockton South in the 1983 General Election when Margaret Thatcher was in her pomp, but days before polling, it was revealed that in the 1970s he had been active in the National Front in his native Birmingham.

Shocked, Mrs Thatcher issued an apology, and the Tories lost a seat they expected to win by 102 votes to the SDP, a breakaway group from Labour.

At Zhivagos, Mr Finnegan had even bigger problems with the figures. He claimed the club had 17,000 members in 1989, but it crashed in and out of liquidation until new owners took it on in 1994, spent £1.5m on it and it then promptly crashed into receivership.

The nightclub is next to a derelict church where demolition has been held up first by the pandemic and then by an infestation of rats, which needed to be dealt with so that they didn’t occupy neighbouring premises. It may be possible that the two buildings come down at the same time.