Plans for a new £31m entertainment district with theatres and studios were unveiled by Greenwich Council last week.

The plans for the creative hub are on the site of the Royal Arsenal listed buildings in Woolwich.

READ MORE: New £31m entertainment hub to be built at historic Royal Arsenal site in Woolwich

To learn more about the plans, our reporter Joe Dempsey was shown around the area.

The Royal Arsenal used to employ up to 80,000 at its height during the First World War, but its closure after the Second World War was a “a great loss to the town of Woolwich”.

Speaking to council leader Denise Hyland, she said that the closure of the Royal Arsenal “meant raised unemployment and the retail town that was once very popular and very busy fell on hard times.”

That economic hardship continued. Cllr Hyland said: “Not just during the 1970s, but during the 80s and even the 90s and even in the last recession, we really struggled to put Woolwich on the map even though it’s destined to be a metropolitan centre for London.

“What do you do as a council? Do you sit back and watch the local economy failing or do you be more interventionist?

“Our decision was to intervene in the market and give Woolwich a sense of place as it once had when it had the Arsenal running.”

The idea is to keep these listed buildings intact but transform their insides into theatres, orchestra concert halls, and related studios and offices for the arts.

One of the more ambitious plans is for a 4,000 seater performance theatre for orchestras at the old munitions factory.

The building was used by the ‘canaries’, workers whose skin was stained yellow as they packed the gunpowder and TNT into armaments and munitions.

The walls and ceiling of the building mostly consist of glass to allow sunlight in due to the workers not being allowed have naked flames in case the entire building blew up.

Thanks to the low ceiling, this meant the building was uniquely suited to holding orchestras thanks to its excellent acoustics.

Greenwich Council even brought in a specialised “acoustician” to help identify the best building to hold concerts and orchestras.

A black box, 450-seat theatre is being built at the old cartridge factory, while the old building where tanks were built is being turned into spaces for studios and offices.

According to the person from the council who was showing me, they needed to act quickly or else the buildings would have been taken by property developers and turned into housing.

All this development is happening in large part thanks to Crossrail and the station that is being built barely three minutes away from the Royal Arsenal.

It almost didn’t happen either. Speaking to Cllr Hyland, she said: “These are five historical buildings that could have become residential.

“Originally a Crossrail line was going to run under Woolwich between Abbey Wood and the next stop, which would have been Canary Wharf.”

Crossrail is set to be completed around September 2018 and by then the council hopes a lot of the construction will have been done and companies will have moved in.

Cllr Hyland said: “You know what’s happening with town centres. They used to be retail centres now the town centres are changing.

“You’re now seeing residential going up in town centres which helps the nightlife and the evening economy and the same is true of Woolwich.

“What we want for Woolwich is that if you’ve got entertainment and culture not only for the people of the borough but for visitors.

“One in six people in London work in the creative industries so why wouldn’t we take a share of that economy boom?”