DESIGNER Mark Walters was in for a shock when he arrived in York for a meeting about the design plans for his first Theatre Royal pantomime, Dick Whittington (And His Meerkat).

"I turned up, thinking the show was going to be at Theatre Royal, but all of a sudden I was shown this huge model of a tent, and they said, 'oh, by the way, we've had a change of venue," he recalls.

Mark had signed up to create the set and costumes for the Theatre Royal's familiar proscenium arch design, as lent on for 36 years by dame Berwick Kaler, but the theatre's on-going redevelopment work and archaeological dig necessitated the switch to the Signal Box Theatre at the National Railway Museum. The one with the rail track down the middle and ten long rows of seats either side that had housed In Fog And Falling Snow and The Railway Children earlier in the year.

Now it would be home to Britain's first ever pantomime on a traverse stage, requiring a different train of thought by Mark. "The first thing that came into my mind as Damian [artistic director Damian Cruden] talked about all the other bits and pieces, was 'how are we going to suspend disbelief?'; 'how do you create that theatrical magic when the audience are looking at each other', so I knew it would be challenging."

Challenging, yes, but this is the the set designer who has created well over 40 pantomime sets. "I've never done less than two pantos per year and this year [2015] I've been involved in 16 pantomimes," says Mark, who was appointed head of design at the Queen's Theatre in Hornchurch in 2005 and resident designer at the Royal Court Theatre in Liverpool in 2008.

He has designed ten pantomimes for the Adam Smith Theatre in Kirkcaldy, nine for the aforementioned Royal Court, six for the Wakefield Theatre Royal and four for Coventry's Belgrade Theatre, and he is fast becoming the "go-to man" of panto design.

York Press:

Set and costume designer Mark Walters

"What I try to do at the beginning of the year is get through the planning of all the pantos I'll be doing and then I can do Shakespeare etc!" says Mark, whose designs include the national tours of Hot Flush and Our House.

"About four years ago, I had such an influx of pantomime commissions that I physically couldn't do it all, so I decided to set up my company, Glitter Pantomimes, for which I've bought back all my past panto sets, and it's quite unique that everything I now hire out is all my own work."

He stores his multitude of sets in Nottingham in a warehouse the size of a football pitch. "The biggest challenge is bar-coding and logging everything; it's a statistical nightmare, and it gets interesting when you have 16 lorries turning up at the same time to collect sets," says Mark. "It'll be going up to 18 shows next winter because two more companies will be using my design services for their pantomimes."

Mark has model boxes of scaled versions of all his designs. "So a company will take my generic design for Cinderella, for example, and then I'll design new cloths for them that will work with their scripts," he says.

In addition to those designs for hire, Mark makes bespoke panto designs for such theatres as the Belgrade in Coventry and now York Theatre Royal, for whom he first did a design for Twinkle Little Star in The Studio in April 2008.

York Press:

Ship shape: one of the spectacular design highlights by Mark Walters

He found the prospect of designing sets and scenery for the Signal Box Theatre "quite liberating, knowing the track was already there". "There had been talk of filling in the track but that would have been so labour intensive, so I talked them out of that early on!," says Mark.

"It's probably the longest creative process I've ever done, going back to my original idea in the end, having gone through so many models. What we have is mobile trucks on the track creating a flat floor, where it's like moving a Rubik cube, so it might look simple to the audience but in fact it's complex in its simplicity.

"We have enough space to accommodate eight of these trucks, and each of them has a separate braking system, so the stage crew has to work so hard, with the first song alone having 39 cues."

Aside from the sight of cast members leaping on to the trucks as they move, the eye is drawn to the wonderful costumes and the beautiful carousels that reflect the theme of motion and transport that runs through the show in its NRM setting. "I wanted to create a chocolate box, fairytale feel to the panto, mixing Harry Potter and London, so it looks like it's always moving." says Mark.

"From day one, we decided that it was always going to look like a train platform, so we would embrace that, run with it, rather than apologise for it, and that was the same for the costumes too. It can be quite  forgiving when you're sitting further away in a theatre, but in the Signal Box, I knew the front row would be able to see every button, every stitch, so the costumes all had to have their own character and I had to make them very individual to help tell the story."

Mark was first offered the chance to design the Theatre Royal pantomime five years ago, but already was committed to six other shows, but when he received an email last year saying "we will bend over backwards to accommodate you to ensure we can work with you", he "couldn't say No to that, especially as I knew it would be a unique show".

"I'd been coming to the Theatre Royal panto for 12-13 years, so it's been a joy to design it this time, especially as it's one of the big pantomimes I design," says Mark.

Will he return to York next winter? "I haven't said Yes or No yet as I have to plan out the year ahead, but of course I'd love to the first panto in the new Theatre Royal auditorium," he says. That should be a Yes then.

Dick Whittington (And His Meerkat) runs at the Signal Box Theatre, National Railway Museum, York, until January 24. Box office: 01904 623568 or at yorktheatreroyal.co.uk