Coventry, Warwickshire

Variety

It has become almost second nature to me to seek out the atypical buildings in places that I visit – to look for Victorian architecture in Regency Cheltenham, to find Art Deco in Georgian Bath, to keep my eyes open for the unexpected, not just the Shakespearian, in Stratford-upon-Avon. In Coventry, of course, there’s plenty to look at from the post-World War II rebuilding. But the place also has some buildings that survived the Blitz – medieval town gates, Georgian houses, and this, the former Gaumont-Palace, from the golden age of cinema.

It was opened in 1931 and its facade is very much of its time, with its moderne straight lines and a colour scheme combining off-white and eau de nil. Towards the top, there are four capital-like flourishes that bracket what look like stylized palm or lotus leaves with a pair of scrolls. This kind of detail is from the vocabulary of Egypt-influenced ornament that became ultra-fashionable in the late-1920s after the opening of Tutankhamun’s tomb and the craze for all things ancient Egyptian. Cinemas, where glamorous decoration was just the ticket, were prime sites for this sort of adornment.

The Gaumont-Palace began as a cine-variety venue. This would offer a combination of filmic and live entertainment. An evening programme of a main feature film, a second feature or B movie, and perhaps a newsreel, would be complemented by a sequence of live acts – the comedians, singers, magicians and the like that were the mainstays of the 20th-century theatrical grab-bag known as ‘variety’. Audiences would get a long and varied night out in glamorous surroundings, for a couple of shillings a head.

Like so many buildings in Coventry, the cinema was damaged during the massive air-raid of November 1940 and there was more damage in another attack the following year. But the building survived and was repaired, and continued to screen films after the war. With further modifications (including the fitting of multiple screens), it carried on as a cinema until the end of the 1990s, being converted in 2000 for the media and performing arts students of Coventry University. It is now named after that great woman of the theatre, Ellen Terry, who was born in Coventry.