He has fond memories of a job he felt privileged to be part of. "Every day was different and all eyes in Sheffield were on it and there was great interest in what it was going to be called," he recalls.

"I had been working on another project for Gleeson's (the contractors) in Blackpool and came back to Sheffield, where I lived, as general foreman and later what they called site agent. By the time I came on site they had demolished all the shops on Norfolk Street and the little lanes behind it and had started the excavations."

At first there wasn't a lot of excitement around town because many people thought they were digging out the site for a car park, before word soon got round that a new modern theatre was being built to replace the Playhouse.

The concrete edifice with its thrust stage and steeply raked auditorium was pretty revolutionary. Did Ernest and his colleagues know what the building was going to look like? "There was a model in the Town Hall which gave you an idea of what it was like," he says.

They were more concerned with the nuts and bolts of the design than the aesthetics and there were complicated elements to the job. The biggest was that because the walls were circular, fixing the support for the roof was a matter of precision. "There were no lazers then, it was done by theodolite and the calculation had to be spot-on."

The construction took two years to complete and Ernest was on site nearly every day. "I enjoyed what I was doing, although sometimes the hours could be long. My wife never knew what time I would be home.

"We had visits from famous people like James Mason. There were so many visitors it was a hindrance, to be honest.

"I was still on site on opening night. We carried on working while they were rehearsing. A note went round telling us to watch our language but we soon found the actors were using words we hadn't heard before. They held a special concert for the contractors, which was a good way of trying out the new stage."

Since then Ernest and his family have been to the theatre a few times and he has watched the snooker on TV. "I have been keeping my eye on it," he says. "The last time I went down there was nothing inside it and I thought to myself, I remember pouring that concrete wall."

What does he think of the next stage, as the redevelopment is called? "I think it's going to be all right. I've seen the steel frame at the front which will give it a new look but I know that it will be the same building and most of the changes are things like disabled access because the regulations have changed over the years."

The £15.3m redevelopment is scheduled to be completed by the end of 2009.

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