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.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

The Cheltenham Festival of Literature is in full swing at the moment, so I thought it might be interesting, in between listening to what the writers have to tell us, to listen to what some of Cheltenham’s buildings have to say. I could, of course, go on at length about the town’s Regency architecture – and very beautiful its stuccoed terraces look between the autumn trees – but everyone does that, so I’ve plumped for a different approach: to look at one minor street in the town centre and see what catches my eye.

So here are some buildings in Winchcombe Street, which contains a few Regency houses, some modern sheltered flats, some shops, and several hairdressing salons. One of the latter occupies the former premises of W. W. Dowty’s Photographic Studio. They’ve kept the original sign on the fascia, and there’s a door with a tall oval pane and glazed spandrels with bevelled glass. I’m not sure of the date: perhaps some time between the end of the First World War and the beginning of the second. At the other end of the street, another hairdresser occupies a shop that must have once housed purveyors of fish and game, narrow panels of Edwardian or Victorian tiles illustrating the goods within. Tiles like these are a telling reminder that the town once had several fishmongers, whereas now people have to go to a supermarket to find someone who will mong them some fish. Meanwhile, these tiles remain, a source of historical evidence and visual pleasure.As is Cheltenham’s former Odeon cinema. This finally closed when another chain opened a multiplex in the town. It’s an undistinguished Art Deco building, with the redeeming feature of these two naked women tangled in celluloid high up on the façade. Most passers-by see only the boarded-up entrance of the cinema, steadily becoming more and more of a blot on the townscape. I’d lay odds that most of them never notice the silver ladies, two of several reminders of the unregarded past of a quiet Cheltenham side-street.