Shepton Amulet history from 1975 theatre to comeback bid

By Laura Linham 5th Aug 2026

Local News by Laura Linham 3 hours ago

Shepton Mallet's Amulet is not short of stories. It was built as a modern theatre for the town, renamed after a Roman discovery that turned out to be fake, used as a television backdrop, and is now the focus of a fresh push to bring more of the building back to life.

The Market Place building opened in 1975 as The Centre, a purpose-built theatre and multi-use community venue created as part of a town regeneration project. At the time, it was designed to be more than a hall with chairs. This was meant to be a proper cultural hub for Shepton, with theatre, live music, film screenings and community events under one very solid roof.

It was certainly built to last. Brutalist in style, The Centre was constructed in reinforced concrete and clad in local Doulting stone, giving the town a chunky 1970s landmark that still divides opinion almost half a century later.

Inside, though, it was more clever than it may have looked from the pavement. The building had a scenery fly tower, two-storey artists' dressing rooms and raked auditorium seating that could lift vertically to reveal a sprung dance floor underneath. For a town the size of Shepton, that was serious kit.

Those features mattered because Shepton had no other theatre of its kind, and the wider area had limited provision. The Centre became a place for performances, screenings, dances and nights out — the sort of building that generations of towns build memories around without always noticing at the time.

Archive photographs from 1975 show the original box office, main bar, foyer, grand stairs, projection room and auditorium. Black and white images have been reproduced courtesy of Len Ware, while colour footage of the opening day survives in the BFI short film Babysham's Shepton Mallet Theatre.

The building's name changed in 1990 after the Chi-Rho amulet was discovered in Shepton Mallet. The find caused huge excitement because it appeared to suggest evidence of early Christianity in Somerset, and the theatre was renamed The Amulet in its honour.

That might have been the neat heritage twist, had the story ended there. It did not. Doubts about the amulet's authenticity were raised in the 1990s, and in 2008 metal analysis showed the silver had been refined in the nineteenth century or later. The famous amulet was a fake, albeit a sophisticated one.

The relic may not have been genuine, but the name stuck. The building was later bought by the Bristol Academy of Performing Arts in the mid-2000s and renamed The Academy, before its Amulet name was eventually restored.

The building also had a brief brush with national television. In 2010, while known as The Academy, it appeared in the BBC series Turn Back Time, which used it as a hub and community centre for a programme about Shepton Mallet's High Street.

Today, The Amulet is a building with one foot in use and one foot in limbo. The main reinforced concrete structure is described as sound, but many internal services are outdated, missing or in need of refurbishment. The first-floor main auditorium is currently used as a gym, while areas including the dressing rooms and projection room have fallen into disrepair.

Crucially, many of the original features are still there. The scenery fly tower, stage-to-street gear crane, sprung dance floor and moving seating platform remain, although the seats themselves are no longer in place.

Volunteers have already shown what the ground floor could become again. In summer 2025, they built a 65-seat pop-up auditorium and a 140-capacity pop-up events space, hosting cinema, live music, theatre and dancing.

For supporters of the project, that pop-up season was proof that The Amulet is not just a relic of Shepton's past. It showed the building could still be used, still pull people in, and still give the town a cultural space of its own.

Campaigners are now asking people to send in memories, photos, brochures, posters and other memorabilia from the building's earlier life. They want to hear from people who used The Centre, The Amulet or The Academy, whether they performed there, watched a film, went to a dance or simply remember walking through the doors.

Those stories could become part of the next stage of the project, supporting funding bids and possible displays in the town. For a building with Babycham-era beginnings, a fake Roman relic in its name and a theatre floor that could rise into the air, The Amulet has never been ordinary. Shepton, in fairness, rarely is.