Essex road, London

The reel world

My recent trip to London found me within a couple of streets of Essex Road, so a short detour took me here. I knew there was a former cinema in the street, and had read that it was a good example of ‘Egyptian art deco’, but even this didn’t quite prepare me for this street frontage. Welcome to the former Carlton Cinema in all its glory. A fine work of 1930 by George Coles, an architect best known for the art deco cinemas he designed for Oscar Deutsch of the Odeon chain. Here, though, he was working for the independent cinema company C & R Theatres; the Carlton later became an ABC cinema, then a bingo hall, then a church.*

A vast expanse of white Hathernware ceramic cladding is given the Tutankhamun-accents that cinema (and also factory) designers loved in the late-1920s and early-1930s: elaborately-topped columns,† brightly coloured triangles, striped concave cornices rounding everything off at the top. Looking a little closer there are also decorative relief details around the window openings and a colourful zigzag strip running above the central row of windows.

I alluded to the boy-king Tutankhamun knowingly, because it’s said that the fashion for Egyptian decoration was given a boost by the opening of his tomb by Howard Carter in 1922. Egyptian was also attractive to cinema owners because it was seen as ‘exotic’, and the exotic, romantic, and otherwise unfamiliar and lavish were the kinds of look that they liked to cultivate when taking their customers to another world. Entering the ‘reel’ world of the movies usually entailed leaving the real world outside in the street. But for art deco cinema designers, facades like this were a way of advertising the exotic riches within, and giving even passers-by a taste of movie magic.

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*There’s more on the Carlton, Essex Road at the Cinema Treasures site, which reveals that the venue opened in 1930 with Harold Lloyd in Welcome Danger and closed in 1972 with Reg Varney in Mutiny on the Buses. O tempora o mores!

†Readers who click the factory link will see how the column tops on the Carreras tobacco factory in Mornington Crescent are more lotus-like than the rather stylized ones on the Carlton cinema. The same goes for the more leaf-like decoration on the bases of the factory columns. Since there's nothing ‘authentic’ about these Egyptian buildings, however, this doesn’t detract from the cinema’s design.