Southend-on-Sea bought the cliff-top land for a 500-seat theatre in 1935. Construction began in 1939. Then Hitler invaded Poland and Britain went to war, and the foundations sat half-built on the cliff above the Thames Estuary for the next twenty-four years. Locals took to calling the site 'Southend's white elephant'. In 1963, with the war long over and the seaside resort hungry for a flagship venue, the borough council finally restarted the project on a far more ambitious plan - 1,100 seats, multi-purpose, capable of hosting plays, concerts, conferences, banquets, exhibitions, wrestling, and boxing. The actor Sir Bernard Miles opened it in July 1964, almost thirty years after the council had first bought the field. The next night, the venue's first show featured Norman Vaughan and his troupe of dancers, the Swinging Lovelies. The Cliffs has not been quiet since.
In February 1967 the Cliffs hosted a Grand Pop Festival. The top of the bill was Dave Dee, Dozy, Beaky, Mick and Tich, a chart band whose appeal was straightforward sing-along pop. Lower down the bill, on the same stage on the same night, was Jimi Hendrix. He had been in Britain less than five months. His debut single, Hey Joe, had charted in the United Kingdom that January. He was still playing club venues and supporting other acts. The Westcliff crowd that night got Hendrix as a footnote on a pop bill - and within a year, of course, he was unmistakably the headliner everywhere. The Cliffs has a curious history of catching big careers at exactly the wrong moment. Local boy Lee Evans started his stand-up career at the Joker Comedy Club in the basement Maritime Room in the 1980s, on bills also featuring Frank Skinner, Stewart Lee, and Bob Mills.
On 19 July 1991, Paul McCartney played one of six 'secret' shows at the Cliffs Pavilion during the Unplugged Summer Tour - a small-venue warm-up sequence ahead of MTV's Unplugged broadcast and his subsequent stadium dates. The tickets were not advertised. The audience that night, mostly Southend regulars who happened to look at the notice board, watched McCartney work through the acoustic set that would shortly be sold worldwide on CD. Four years later, on 17 April 1995, Oasis played at the Cliffs. Their drummer Tony McCarroll later wrote in his book Oasis: The Truth that 'nobody had told him they were filming that night, but luckily they had a storming gig'. The filming became the concert film Live By The Sea - Oasis's first official live release, distilled from a single Westcliff performance into a permanent record of a band at the peak of Britpop.
From July 1991 to December 1992 the building was closed for a major redevelopment funded by Southend Borough Council, designed by Tim Foster Architects. The stairs were rebuilt, a new Foyer Bar was added, and a balcony was inserted into the auditorium - taking capacity up to 1,630. The new extension was finished in Art Deco style, an inspired choice for a seaside theatre on the Thames Estuary. The refurbished building won a Civic Design Award in 1993. It reopened with the pantomime The Pied Piper of Hamelin starring Wayne Sleep, Peggy Mount, and Richard Marner. A larger Stage Two redevelopment was planned for 1998 - new raked seating, a taller fly tower, a new stage house meeting the dimensions for major touring companies - but the Arts Council Lottery bid for twelve million pounds was rejected in 1999, and the bigger project quietly died.
In 2003 Rik Mayall and Adrian Edmondson recorded the final show of the Bottom Live: Weapons Grade Y-Fronts Tour at the Cliffs. It was the last time the two played their characters Richie and Eddie on stage; Mayall died in 2014 and the tour they ended that night in Westcliff was, by accident, the show's farewell. On 21 June 2009 Blur played a warm-up gig at the Cliffs ahead of their reunion sets at Glastonbury and Hyde Park, and the recording of Beetlebum from that night was released on Blur's Live 2009 CD, given away free with the Sunday Times. The Cliffs has a peculiar talent for catching career-pivot moments and pressing them onto media. Micky Flanagan filmed The Out Out Tour DVD there in 2011. Jimmy Carr filmed his Netflix special His Dark Material there in 2020, the first show after the venue's COVID closure.
On 4 January 1965, the BBC broadcast the first professional wrestling event ever shown on British television live from the Cliffs - Mike Marino, World Mid-Heavyweight Champion, against Harlem Jimmy Brown from the United States. Wrestling continued for years afterwards. Boxing was regular: a 1971 Jack Solomons promotion with Dan McAlinden against Roberto Davila on BBC, a 1987 Terry Lawless and Matchroom Sport promotion with Gary Mason against Andre van den Oetelaar. The 1982 WDF Europe Cup darts tournament was held here - Bobby George took the men's singles. From 1986 to 1988 the Cliffs hosted the invitation-only Matchroom Professional Championship in snooker. Layered into the same building's history, then, alongside Hendrix and McCartney and Mayall, are the first televised wrestling match in British history and an international darts cup.
The Cliffs Christmas pantomime has run unbroken since 1983, occupying a particular cultural niche - the festive variety show that draws families from across south Essex year after year. The roll of stars who have done the panto reads like a complete index of British television entertainment across forty years: Davy Jones of the Monkees (Dick Whittington, 1983), Johnny Ball, Suzi Quatro, John Inman, Joe Pasquale (three times so far), Wayne Sleep, Shane Richie (twice), Frank Bruno (with Sooty, 2002), Russ Abbot, David Hasselhoff (as Peter Pan, 2014), Brian Conley (four times), Diversity (twice), and most recently Rylan Clark, who took Jack and the Beanstalk in 2024 and was nominated for Best Newcomer at the 2025 Pantomime Awards. The 2025 panto is Cinderella, with Rylan returning. The Cliffs pantomime is one of those local British institutions that quietly transmits a tradition: the kid who saw Davy Jones at the Cliffs in 1983 takes their kid in 2024 to see Rylan.
On 13 February 2022, the Cliffs hosted a memorial concert called He Built This City, in honour of Sir David Amess, the Conservative MP for Southend West who had been murdered in his constituency surgery on 15 October 2021. Amess had campaigned for decades for Southend-on-Sea to be granted city status. The week of the concert culminated in Charles, then Prince of Wales, formally granting city status to Southend - a posthumous fulfilment of a long political wish. The Cliffs had been booked because no other Southend venue was big enough. The performers included Digby Fairweather, Lee Mead, and Leanne Jarvis. A few months later, in November 2021, the operator Trafalgar Theatres and Southend-on-Sea City Council had announced an eight-million-pound refurbishment of the building - new restaurant, new entrance and lobby, upgraded ventilation, new outdoor piazza - funded partly through the UK government's Levelling Up fund. Work began in 2024 after several delays. The Cliffs Pavilion at sixty is still being rebuilt around its own ongoing performances.
Coordinates 51.5352 N, 0.6969 E, on Station Road in Westcliff-on-Sea, a suburb within the city of Southend-on-Sea, Essex. The venue stands on the clifftop above the Thames Estuary, on the north bank looking south across the river to Kent. From the air, identify it by the distinctive Art Deco extension on the clifftop, set back slightly from the seafront promenade. Recommended viewing altitude 1,500-3,000 feet. Nearest airports: London Southend (EGMC) 2 nm north, Lydd (EGMD) 30 nm south-east across the estuary, London City (EGLC) 28 nm west.