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Royal Shakespeare Theatre will open after three and a half years with major facelift, better seating and more ladies' loos

The Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon, whose doors have been closed for three and a half years for a £112.8m refurbishment, will reopen this November. When it does, according to the Royal Shakespeare Company's artistic director, Michael Boyd, the revamped theatre will provide "the best auditorium for performing Shakespeare anywhere".

For Shakespeare fans, the facelift is long overdue. The old theatre was locally nicknamed "the jam factory" for its industrial appearance, while an unsightly car park ruined its handsome 1930s frontage by architect Elisabeth Scott. "It was," said Rab Bennetts of Bennetts Associates, the architectural practice that has overseen the redevelopment, "a hostile building that turned its back on the town".

And that was before you got inside: some seats were as far as 37 metres away from the stage – a distance that has now halved. The "furthest seat" will remain in situ, in a spot now part of the restaurant, as a reminder of the bad old days.

Female members of the audience, in particular, will have cause to rejoice come November: the number of ladies' lavatories has increased from 19 to 47.

Best of all, the redevelopment will come in on time and on budget, according to Boyd. There is £5m yet to raise, but Vikki Heywood, the RSC's executive director, said she was confident it would come in the next five months from "individuals and charitable trusts to whom we have been talking for a while".

The new theatre, with its high running costs, will open at a time of cuts to public funding of the arts which could be as deep as 25%. Though it is recruiting for jobs with the new theatre, the RSC has frozen pay for existing staff. Boyd said he was hoping the new shop, restaurant, cafe and bar would all provide revenue.

The main theatre and the smaller stage, the Swan, will open to the public from 24 November for visits and one-off events including a version of Shakespeare's sonnets by the director Peter Brook, who created some of his most celebrated productions for the RSC between 1950 and 1970.

In February, full-scale performances will start, with revivals of Rupert Goold's production of Romeo and Juliet, and David Farr's King Lear, with Greg Hicks in the title role. At the Swan, the Irish cabaret singer Camille O'Sullivan will perform a new version of Shakespeare's poem, The Rape of Lucrece. Meanwhile, the temporary auditorium, the Courtyard Theatre, will still be up and running. Opening there in November will be a new musical, Matilda, an adaptation of the Roald Dahl story. Its book is by playwright Dennis Kelly, with lyrics and music by the comic and musician Tim Minchin.

The first large-scale new work to appear on the 1,000-seat main stage from the spring will be announced in November, when the company finalises plans for its 50th anniversary from April 2011 onwards. Aside from (of course) Shakespeare, Boyd said the company would restage some of the plays the company has commissioned over its half-century, mentioning in particular founding director Peter Hall's affinity with the late Harold Pinter.

Boyd said he thought Matilda, A Musical "might have legs, and we hope it will". A show in the West End and even on Broadway would significantly help the RSC through a period of austerity.

In addition, said Boyd, the theatre would "celebrate things that screen art cannot: the desire to witness and share a gathering of a community in real space and real time. And it achieves three dimensions in a way that Hollywood is desperately trying to achieve. We have 3D in our bones."

English Heritage survey uncovers repairs backlog of £900m, most of which is heavily dependent on shrinking grant aid

The condition of one in 10 places of worship is causing grave concern, according to a survey released today by English Heritage.

A sample of England's 14,500 listed places of worship – the largest single category of listed buildings – was surveyed in detail for the report. It found 10% in need of urgent and usually hugely complex and expensive repairs, a further 30% in poor condition, and the remainder lovingly maintained through heroic efforts by often tiny congregations.

English Heritage estimates there is a backlog of over £900m worth of urgent repairs, often due to lack of basic maintenance such as on roofs and gutters.

Major repair and conservation work is heavily dependent on grant aid, but those sources are precarious – English Heritage will inevitably have to make further budget cuts as government spending cuts bite. The main Heritage Lottery Fund-backed grants scheme is only assured until 2013, and a special provision for places of worship introduced by Labour, where the Treasury refunds the VAT – levied on repairs but not on new build, despite years of campaigning by conservation groups – runs out next year.

The situation being tackled by Andrew Mottram, at a group of churches in Dudley, represents an extreme example of all the problems spelled out in the report.

Mottram, a former vicar, is one of a growing national network of support officers, jointly funded by the church authorities and English Heritage. His job is to worry about hundreds of churches across the diocese of Worcester, advising on repairs and new uses to keep the buildings open and purposeful in the heart of their communities.

Every one of Dudley's seven large churches, four of them listed, has intractable problems. And while they have enough space for 5,000 worshippers, there is a total congregation in the town of fewer than 400 and falling.

The churches were built mainly in the 19th century for a boom town in the west Midlands with full employment in the metalworking industry. They now stand in a blighted landscape of derelict buildings, closed factories, shops and workshops, cleared sites, shuttered abandoned pubs with tattered "for sale" signs flapping in the wind. Right in the centre Beatties, the department store which was once the pride of the town, is also shuttered and desolate, its lifeblood drained by the out of town Merry Hill shopping centre. Even a nearby sex shop has a sign on the door offering "new lower prices".

There is a local authority town centre regeneration scheme, but it won't lap up the hills as far as most of Mottram's churches.

There's lovely St Thomas's, Grade II* listed, its magnificent spire held together with rusting iron clamps, with 25 people rattling around among seats for 1,000.

There's St James's, where the urgent job of replacing all the leaking gutters and downpipes has just been downgraded to second most urgent when great chunks of stone dropped off the tower, two days before hundreds of children were due to march through the door below for a school service. The vicar, Andrew Wickens, has been offered a repair grant by English Heritage, but has just learned he can't raise the match funding.

And then there's St John's. Mottram sighs. Everyone sighs at the mention of St John's.

St John's stands, just, on top of Kates Hill, with a dazzling view from its steep churchyard which holds the grave of a local hero, the 19th-century boxer nicknamed the Tipton Slasher. The church itself is closed and fenced off, windows boarded, cracked walls streaked with damp and mould, concrete surrounds cracking ominously and littered with freshly fallen chunks of stone. A heavy new concrete tile roof 30 years ago did more damage to the structure than the leaking slates it replaced.

Richard Stanton, who now lives in Bridgnorth, has come back to visit the graves of his parents. "It's awful to see it like that, I remember it full of people every week," he says sadly.

A dauntless preservation society is running a little charity shop and cafe next door, but it's going to take a lot of 20p tombola tickets and 30p glasses of squash to save St John's. The congregation has moved into the red-brick church hall across the road, beside the derelict pub: they would like to see the church restored, but they don't want to move back into the great cold draughty barn.

The diocese and the congregation are so sensitive about the state and possible future of St John's they don't even want it photographed.

Mottram is brutal: "This building is knackered. It might be rescuable – but it's going to cost a heck of a lot of money."

Key findings

The first English Heritage report on England's 14,500 listed places of worship at risk found:

• Approximately 10% are potentially in need of urgent major repairs.

• At least £925m worth of overdue repairs must be done in the next five years.

• For two-thirds of congregations, funding major repairs is a constant source of worry.

• Without the £25m a year repair grants scheme, joint funded by English Heritage and the Heritage Lottery Fund, 76% of repair and maintenance projects could not have been completed in the past eight years, and up to 266 places of worship would have closed because their condition was so dangerous.

• One in five said they could not have done repairs without the Treasury scheme which refunds VAT for repairs on places of worship. This runs out next year, just as VAT is set to increase from 17.5% to 20%.

Our parks are in peril but it's not enough just to save them from funding cuts – great public spaces need events that engage everyone

It is in the best of times that we expect to have great public spaces, but it is in the worst of economic times that we really need them to be great. It is only here that we can escape the stress and strains, take time out from the doom and gloom to play, meet friends, lie (hopefully) in the sunshine or enjoy a staycation. They aren't a luxury but an essential natural health service, the ultimate drop-in centre – preventative healthcare that is far cheaper than the NHS, and without a waiting list.

Shame then that not only will our vital public spaces be among the first to bear the brunt of the cuts – no nice parkies, no more events, planting of flowers, clean toilets, open cafes, grass cutting, litter collection or working fountains – but that those civic squares, now run privately, seem increasingly restrictive of what you can do in a so-called public space.

Try this simple test: lie on one of those ubiquitous monolithic granite benches and see how long it is before you are asked to move (carrying a bottle of beer speeds this up considerably) or sit on a patch of grass. My record for the latter is one minute and 45 seconds before removal – and this was when I was actually judging the space for a competition! And no it didn't win. Now try wearing overalls in one such square – I watched as two gents, who were eating their sandwiches on their break from a nearby construction site, were moved on by the security guard. The management were worried that dust from their overalls might be transferred on to the Hugo Boss suits of office workers when they used the benches. So now we have white-collar spaces, it seems. Shame because if the owners were a bit more community-spirited these spaces could make a really great contribution to our urban street life.

Why the rant? Good spaces are nutrients of urban life. They help keep our heart happy and are a vital ingredient in creating a community where there is tolerance and respect for each other, where the so-called "big society" happens naturally. Yes they may contain nuts, but that's the point – they are for everyone. Our parks and squares and streets are our truly democratic spaces, where all can gather equally and freely to hang out, protest, celebrate and commiserate.

Now I have reservations about John Ruskin (appalling snob, hated contemporary fiction in the greatest age of the novel, weird crushes on nine-year-olds) but he was right when he said that "the measure of a city's greatness is to be found in the quality of its public spaces, its parks and its squares". He could have added the measure of our towns, too. By quality, it is the quality of ideas not just materials that counts. The public want variety, too, and the possibility of exciting and interesting things happening.

Right now that might mean temporary screens showing World Cup matches, but it doesn't mean permanent mega TVs dominating squares, sound turned off like in some open-air branch of Currys. Or naff bits of public art (why are they nearly always red?) to brighten up dull grey piazzas. Or as I saw recently, a bronze of children playing leapfrog – where real kids would probably be stopped from doing so for health and safety reasons (keep the real ones in springy, chicken-filled rubber playgrounds, I hear the child-free cry). People want events and art that engage everyone, that don't exclude, that excite and thrill us especially at a time when we all need a bit of cheering up. Like Artichoke's wonderful Sultan's Elephant – magical, awe-inspiring and almost impossible to pull off, given the restrictions imposed.

We need our spaces to be like ourselves: different, distinctive, displaying a range of moods from subdued to very loud. Great open spaces require open minds to design and look after them, to allow culture to flourish, and to support creativity and fun. Dear old Ruskin would approve of that. Pity he can't join our debate at the Tate Modern tonight with Janet Street-Porter, Sir Ian Blair and others.

To most, the ring of hammer on nail as shop windows are boarded up on Britain's struggling high streets can only mean unemployment and decline. But for a growing band of optimists, it heralds a golden opportunity.

Artists and curators have begun colonising "slack space" freed up by the recession and are transforming vacant shops into "creative squats", galleries and studios.

Former branches of shops including Woolworths and Carphone Warehouse, as well as independent stores, have been colonised to house community cafes and performance art events and promote the work of local artists.

The slack space movement has echoes in previous slumps when many now successful architects, magazine publishers and artists moved into vacant premises. There is certainly room for creativity again. One in six shops will be vacant by the end of the year, according to the data company Experian. It predicts that 72,000 retail outlets could close during 2009, more than doubling the number of empty units to 135,000 in the UK.

In a struggling 1970s shopping centre in Margate, local artists have been allowed to take over about a dozen recently closed stores that sold everything from computer games to fruit and vegetables.

Justin Mitchell and Emily Firmin, who inherited her craft skills from her father Peter Firmin, the creator of Bagpuss, are planning to open a papier-mache workshop in a disused greengrocer's shop. They will produce works in front of shoppers to brighten up other disused shop fronts.

"We are coating the windows with vinyl in bright seaside colours and there will be an aperture in the middle revealing a box in which will be a model suggesting what a shop could become," said Heather Sawney, arts development director at Thanet district council. "There might be a giant lobster to suggest a fishmonger or a huge muffin suggesting a cake shop. We are trying to stimulate people's imagination because in these tough economic times things can become a bit dreary."

"Rather than letting lots of pound shops appear, we are encouraging people to start up businesses," said Firmin. "We know recessions are awful but can be a good time for artists as creative ideas start appearing while otherwise redundant people are sitting at home fiddling and doing creative stuff."

In Dursley, Gloucestershire, artists have colonised a parade of disused shops where they sell their paintings, photographs and ceramics. The flaking window frames of a closed skateboard shop, photography shop and an upholsterer have been repainted and the displays given over to a rotating gallery of 20 artists.

"This part of Dursley has been run down for a long time so moving in here has been a fantastic thing," said Gillie Harris, a painter and textile artist who is occupying the defunct photography shop. "Those of us involved think it could be repeated across England and Wales where the recession is hitting their market towns."

Karen Hillyard, the project co-ordinator, said: "By showcasing local artists we help the regeneration of the town [and] at the same time give the appearance of productivity. There is nothing more dreary than walking through a town with a desolate feel."

The idea of creative reuse of Britain's high street failures is spreading. Ted Cantle, executive chairman of the Institute of Community Cohesion, which advises the government, has called for the conversion of vacant Woolworths stores across the country into modern market halls, populated by farmers' outlets and local businesses. Cantle said it would return vibrancy to struggling town centres in a downturn that he described as an opportunity to loosen the stranglehold of national and multinational brands.

"I'd like to see more local shops and services operating in the high street so there would be more differentiation, say, between Southampton and Sunderland," he said. "The first occupants could be the local farmers who presently have to contend with all weathers on windswept car parks. They could share refrigeration, storage, cash handling and marketing, gaining a prominent daily foothold in the high street, benefiting from the economies of scale."

The branch of Woolworths in Stroud, Gloucestershire, which closed its doors on 6 January, is about to be turned over to artists after the council gained temporary permission to bring it back to life. The town centre manager, Vicky Hancock, plans to hand over the windows to artists. In Dorchester, Claire Robertson, a former Woolworths manager, has spotted a commercial opportunity and is planning to reopen the store as Wellworths, selling pick 'n' mix sweets, toys, home and kitchen items and textiles. She believes she will turn over £2m a year and hopes it will earn the nickname Wellies.

There are likely to be many opportunities to bring new life to old Woolworths stores. Sources close to the deal to dispose of the 800 shops believe up to 200 may not find a tenant within two years.

Slack space

"Slack space" caused by business closures during recessions has provided a foothold for numerous successful businesses. Neal's Yard Remedies, the cosmetics company which now operates across the US and Japan as well as in the UK was established by Romy Fraser in a disused warehouse in Covent Garden, central London, in 1981.

Three years earlier in Bath at the end of the recession of the mid-1970s, a group of architects moved into a recently closed greengrocer's shop before buying the whole building for just £10,000. The firm, now called Feilden Clegg Bradley Studios, last year won the Stirling prize for the best new building by a British architect.

The Roundhouse in Camden, north London, became a thriving cultural venue in the 1960s and 1970s from the hulk of a disused railway shed, while in Manchester in the early 1980s young entrepreneur Tom Bloxham set up a T-shirt business in Affleck's Palace, a fashion market in a disused building in the city's Northern Quarter. He is now the chairman of Urban Splash, a property development firm which had a £57m turnover in 2007.

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It opened last June: late, incomplete and over-budget. Since then, the Public in West Bromwich has split local opinion; many thought a threadbare schedule and the failure to open the centrepiece digital gallery was poor value for £60m.

Yesterday management was trying to work out whether to celebrate or mourn, after the Arts Council axed the £500,000 revenue grant – half the annual running costs – but offered the local authority £3m to come up with a new business plan to make the landmark building work.

Now owned by Sandwell council, the Public will not close, at least in the medium term. The cafe, 500-seat theatre, conventional art exhibitions, recording studios and music gigs are up and running, but the digital arts gallery may never open.

The Arts Council chair, Sir Christopher Frayling, said: "The fact is that, although the building is open, the interactive art gallery at the centre of the vision for the Public is not. We have done everything we can but there comes a point where we have to make a difficult judgment."

The Public director, David Clarke, has pledged to keep the centre going and praised the support from the local authority: "They've been visionary. We all need to hold our nerve."

The spectacular building, designed by Will Alsop, equally mocked and admired, a vast black hangar pierced with blobby pink-framed windows and nicknamed "the pink elephant", opened two years late. The project went into administration in 2006 and chief executive Sylvia King, whose idea it was, left. It was saved by the local authority and a further injection of public funds.

However, the £7 admission charge had to be abandoned because the digital gallery, in which visitors would be linked by chips to computers creating their own constantly changing light shows, never worked and has never opened.

The Arts Council called in independent consultants, who concluded that, even if it worked, the gallery could never achieve the 160,000 paying visitors a year on which the business plan was based. Sandwell was seeking a threefold increase in the Arts Council grant, up to £1.5m from 2011. Instead, the council decided to axe the grant from March next year.

The sweetener was the offer of a one-off £3m grant to Sandwell to come up with a better business and artistic plan. "The real tragedy for everyone would be if this building's doors were to close forever," a spokeswoman said.

In West Bromwich, the view was succint. "I've not seen £60 million's worth this morning," said retired teacher Denis Winning, who had come from Wolverhampton on spec because of the fuss. He had found everything either closed or broken.

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