Balham Hill, London

Light exercise

Sometimes I deliberately get off at the wrong tube station. But it’s not what you think. I’m neither covering up my geographical incompetence with the cloak of deliberation, nor am I on a ruthless quest for exercise. I get off and walk because you never know what you might see on the way. So one fine day, en route to visit friends who live near Balham underground station, I get off at Clapham South instead, and schlep my bag southwards, along Balham Hill.

I’ve not gone far before this hoves into view. ‘Of course,’ I think. ‘I’ve seen this in books. Books about cinema architecture.’ It’s the former Balham Odeon,* was designed by the Odeon’s house architect, George Coles, and opened in 1938 with the film Blondes for Danger. If the title of that film is very much of its time, so is the architecture of the cinema: large and tiled, with curved corners and a rather chunky tower. It’s Art Deco, but not the highly ornate Deco of some examples, certainly not with any hint of the historicising decoration of cinemas like the one in Essex Road or the extraordinary interior of the Granada, Tooting, which was the nearest big cinema to this one. The Balham Odeon is just huge, 1930s-modern, and rather lumpish.§

But to think of it simply as a lump is to miss its point. It was designed to be seen at its best at night, when film-goers would turn up to be greeted by bands of neon stretching horizontally along the facade and vertically up the tower. The name ODEON was lit up in neon too and the lights make the building look much less lumpen than it seems by day. Its hilly location and illuminated tower meant that it could be seen for miles too – an effective if brazen advertisement for the cinematic joys within.† There are, I know, people who will think that its night-time illumination is insufficient excuse for the daytime appearance of this building. I have a certain sympathy for this opinion, but I offer the after-dark view as a reminder that things are not always, 24/7, what they seem. And that there is more than one way to look at a building.

Balham Odeon at night. Photograph © English Heritage

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* The name of Oscar Deutsch’s company, Odeon, derives from an ancient Greek word for theatre. It was only after the company had adopted it that a clever member of the firm’s publicity department realised that its letters could provide the initials of a catchy slogan: Oscar Deutsch Entertains Our Nation.

§ And encumbered with telecommunications equipment. Only connect.

† There are no longer neon lights and the building’s front of house, in normal times, is given over to the useful business of selling wine; there are apartments to the rear.

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.