Firefighters were seen “pulling the roof off” a building near the theatre to get to the blaze, according to reports.<\/p>\n
Melanie Bonner, who works at a nearby pharmacy, told the Southend Echo: \u201cThe police were keeping people away. There were loads of people crowding round to take pictures. It was pure black smoke, high too.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt kicked off around half 3pm and firefighters arrived within about half hour.<\/p>\n
\u201cYou could just smell the smoke. Firefighters were pulling the roof off the get to the fire.\u201d<\/p>\n
Her co-worker Freya Miller added: \u201cThere was just a lot of smoke and it was all hazy outside. It absolutely stunk, just a bad burning smell.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe had some customers in but they all left to see what was going on.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Firefighters were seen “pulling the roof off” a building near the theatre to get to the blaze, according…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":99968,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[2583,59,57,58,50,48838,48840,48839,13009,56,54,55],"class_list":["post-99967","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-united-kingdom","tag-fire-news","tag-gb","tag-great-britain","tag-greatbritain","tag-news","tag-southend-fire","tag-southend-news","tag-southend-theatre","tag-southend-on-sea","tag-uk","tag-united-kingdom","tag-unitedkingdom"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99967","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=99967"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/99967\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/99968"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=99967"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=99967"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=99967"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}