Manchester, Oxford Road

 

People’s palace

Taking the bus from the centre of Manchester to the Whitworth Art Gallery to save time and avoid the rain, I saw this building out of the window…and of course had to walk back to take a closer look. Manchester is full of buildings clad in terracotta, but not so many in a tasteful combination of green and cream faience that catches the eye, is in theory at least easy to keep clean, and stands out from the crowd in a way that’s an effective bit of self-advertising. Perfect of course for a cinema, The Grosvenor Picture Palace no less, its Art Nouveauish lettering announcing that for a small fee, anyone can luxuriate in palatial surroundings while enjoying the latest in cinematic entertainment.

It’s an early cinema, designed in 1913 and opened in 1915,* when the 1000-seater claimed to be the largest outside London and offered, in addition to films, the opportunity to play snooker or billiards in the basement.† The architect was a local man, Percy Hothersall, who designed several cinemas and on this occasion worked with the Middleton Fireclay Works of Leeds to produce the ceramic cladding for the building. Pilasters, swags, roundels, circular oeil de boeuf windows, and a shallow dome on the corner produce an effect of decorative classicism. It’s fairly formulaic stuff that would have been bread and butter to both the architect and the ceramics company, but it must have looked sophisticated to most of the cinema’s first customers.

Cinemas like the Grosvenor were part of a swelling tide of picture houses, which became more and more popular as the film industry got going. Architect Percy Hothersall was drawn into this trend, not only designing cinemas, but sometimes taking his fee in shares in cinema companies. He seems to have made a lot of money out of this, but apparently invested his profits unwisely, and was declared bankrupt in 1926. It’s a sad story, all the more so because the popularity of cinema-going lasted until well after World War II and a wiser investor could have continued to make profits. The Grosvenor showed movies until 1968, after which, like so many cinemas, it was used as a bingo hall before it became a pub. The eye-catching exterior is no doubt just as effective an advertisement as it originally was.

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* Cinema was barely 20 years old at this point. The Lumière brothers first demonstrated their Cinematographe in December 1895. The first decade of the 20th century saw the rapid growth of film industries in many countries.

† I’m indebted to the Architects of Greater Manchester website for information about this building and its architect.

Northwich, Cheshire

Ancient and modern

I’d read that there was an early cinema building in Northwich, but I wasn’t prepared for quite how handsome it is – one of the town’s few buildings that’s good enough to be listed, in fact. Its architects, William and Segar Owen of Warrington,* working in 1928, did not choose to produce some pastiche of Cheshire’s indigenous timber-framing, neither did they go for the latest Art Deco style, soon to become de rigeur for cinemas up and down the country. Instead, they adopted the vocabulary of neo-classicism: cornices, architraves, a central section that breaks forward decorated with swags, honeysuckle, and rosettes. Even the way in which the whole building is raised on a plinth, with the entrance up three steps from the pavement level, reminds one of ancient Greek temples. Beneath the neo-classical skin is a steel frame, perhaps to protect the building from the subsidence prevalent in the town due to the removal of subterranean brine by the salt industry.

One challenge for an architect designing the facade of a cinema is the lack of windows to break up the expanse of wall. The only place you want windows in a cinema is the foyer. The designer here avoided an uninterrupted blank wall by adding mouldings to the frontage to make a series of panels, which are now picked out in pastel shades.† The windows that flank the entrance are emphasized with striking diagonal glazing bars, recalling the design of gates and grilles in reconstructions of ancient Greek temples.

The central focus, only partly obscured by the building’s glazed canopy, is the large entrance arch, with its sculpture of a pair of putti (very classical) flanking a camera on a tripod (very Hollywood), a witty icon of the building’s function.¶ Early cinemas often combined ancient and modern (one thinks of the Art Deco inflected Egyptian and classical decoration of a building like the Forum in Bath, for example). Northwich’s Plaza achieves this with style. Back in 1928, the people of Northwich would have needed no reminder of what lay behind this intriguing facade – much of the population was drawn to the movies as the latest form of entertainment, and everyone would have known that this was a cinema. Today, after decades as a bingo hall, the Plaza is now a music venue, and it’s nice to have this small reminder of its original use.

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* William Owen worked at William Lever’s model village at Port Sunlight, a very different but highly distinguished project. Segar and Geoffrey Owen were his architect sons. Some authorities suggest that the member of the partnership who worked on this building was in fact Geoffrey.

† Earlier images show brighter colours, but the current scheme looks in keeping with the building’s design.

¶ Please click on the picture to see the details more clearly.

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.

Devizes, Wiltshire

 

Now showing…

Entranced on previous visits to Devizes by such buildings as the delightful stone-fronted Parnella House and the massive Victorian red-brick brewery, I’d overlooked the cinema, which stands between these two landmarks. When I did look at it, I found it pleasant but rather enigmatic. There are Art Deco things about it – notably the very plain pilasters or piers, which run right up to the parapet, where the central ones pierce the skyline. But the facade also has the look of an earlier era – the swags and the various curved dripstones feel to me Edwardian. Likewise the rather demure torch-bearing statues that stand on brackets above the cinema’s name: they’re a far cry from the celluloid lasciviousness of some Art Deco cinema decoration, while also avoiding the stylization or symbolism common in other 1930s cinemas, although the faux-flaming torches do feel to me a bit more akin to Art Deco.

The Devizes cinema, in its first incarnation, was an early one, opening, according to the excellent Cinema Treasures site, in 1912 as the Electric Palace. The same website also tell us that the cinema was enlarged in the late-1920s – could this be the date of this white, rather chaste facade? The latest edition of the Pevsner Wiltshire volume actually gives the date of the building as 1932 and the architects as Satchwell and Roberts of Birmingham. So what I think we have here is something very much of the Art Deco period but in a style that fits the more restrained setting of a country town better than the sometimes brash, sometimes stylish full-blown Art Deco efforts of the architects who worked for the Odeon or Gaumont chains. The current owners, according to press reports earlier this year, are said to be intending to upgrade the building. One hopes that they produce plans that are both viable and respectful of the frontage and setting, so that this modest but elegant cinema can serve the town once more.

Burnham-on-Sea, Somerset

Light the lights

The facade of the Ritz cinema in Burnham-on-Sea looked somewhat the worse for wear when I passed it the other day – but, no matter, the place is still open and still showing films, on three screens now I believe, unlike the single screen that it had when it opened in 1936. It presents to the street a very plain front, rendered in cream, with a central section breaking forward slightly and accommodating three simple rectangular windows and the sign bearing the name above. It’s Art Deco, in other words, of the most pared-down kind.

The lettering in the sign is pretty simple too. Four capitals, with all the strokes more or less equal in width and all the characters very square-looking, including even the initial R, which has been made to do some rather alien things in order to eliminate its usual curves. It’s not the most pleasing of letters, this R, but in the context of the plain, simple, rectilinear building it makes sense. Imagine the neon tubes of the sign lit up at night, as one must with such a cinema building, and the whole thing works – even though we lose what caught my eye on the sunny Sunday afternoon I was there: the lucky similarity between the colour of the lettering and the blue of the sky.

Chard, Somerset

Old and new

So you build a cinema in 1937 in the latest pared-back moderne style, all straight lines, plain brickwork, and strips of metal-framed windows. You decorate in a similiar style inside, with a stepped ceiling and concealed lighting, so that cinema-goers could imagine for a moment that they were in the latest picture palace in London, or Honiton anyway. And you call your cinema the Cerdic, after the first king of Wessex. It seems an odd mixture, but cinema was like that in the 1930s – and still is, one could say – using the latest technology and style, but equally at home in the worlds of science fiction and historical romance.

The Cerdic cinema was one of a small West Country chain run by the Wessex Kinema Company. There were others in Wellington, Somerset, and – yes – Honiton, Devon and, according the the excellent Cinema Treasures website, the buildings were almost identical. The architect was Edward de Wilde Holding (1886–1958), who was based in Northampton and form the evidence of this frontage had the idiom at his fingertips. The building doesn’t seem totoally out of place in the centre of the town of Chard – a place after all of old factories built of red bricks. As with so many cinemas, the exterior architecture is all about the facade. As you can see from my photograph, the rear of the building is a simple shed with a monopitched roof.

The Cerdic closed in 1962 and after a spell as a DIY store it was taken over by the Wetherspoon pub chain, who no doubt liked the combination of usable space and a long street frontage. Their popular pubs occupy numerous buildings (from old offices to spas) that might otherwise have struggled to survive in England’s town centres. This one was already filling up on the morning I passed by, as people took advantage of the building’s enduring mix of the old and the new.

Aldeburgh, Suffolk

Kinematic

What does a cinema look like? If you have an image of a ‘typical’ cinema in your mind’s eye, it might look like something from the interwar period, maybe an Art Deco monster cinema like the one in Balham that I posted not long ago, or a structure adorned with decoration evocation the glamour of the cinema, such as the pair of naked women circled in strips of celluloid that once signposted a cinema in Cheltenham. Or, these days, it might be one of the anonymous town centre multiplexes of which only the front door and a panel of posters is visible.

But there is no ‘standard’ cinema design. People project films in all kinds of settings. In the small Cotswold town where I live, there was once a cinema in the Town Hall, whereas Woodhall Spa, a small town in Lincolnshire, is home to the Kiinema in the Woods, a surprising and picturesque former sports pavilion. The cinema in Aldeburgh is similarly surprising, a half-timbered building, small enough not to look at all out of scale in the town’s lovely main street. But it’s not exactly discreet – the half-timbering means it’s easy to find and gives it that touch of whimsy that has seen its larger cousins dressed up in a 1930s version of ancient Egyptian or Grecian garb.

The building is also one of the oldest cinemas in continuous operation. It began in 1919,* when an existing shop was extended to house the auditorium, and, like many an early cinema, has also hosted live theatre shows. The cinema has kept going with a mix of feature films, ‘art house’ screenings, and even, recently, a documentary festival. It also caught on early to the recent trend for offering ‘live’ screenings of major theatre and opera productions. So, what do you think of when someone mentions Aldeburgh? Benjamin Britten? Maggi Hambling? Fish and chips? Festivals of music or poetry or comedy? Perhaps film should be on the list too. Although I didn’t make it inside when I visited Aldeburgh late last year, the cinema still seemed to be thriving, with the very active support of the local community. And I hope, when normal conditions eventually resume, it will thrive again.

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* The Lumières’ first public screening was in 1895.

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.

Bridgwater, Somerset

Domes and silk stockings

I make occasional trips to Somerset and sometimes, having left the house early, stop off for a coffee somewhere en route. Bridgwater is one of my occasional stopping places. To some, it’s an unassuming town with a rather nondescript High Street, but there are plenty of architectural discoveries to be made (one of the best early Georgian streets in Britain, a Victorian concrete house) for anyone prepared to look. This building, with its square dome, is a landmark at one end of the town and it quickly caught my eye. ‘An early-20th century theatre,’ I thought to myself, and I was partly right. What was originally the Empire Theatre opened in 1916 with a performance of a play called A Pair of Silk Stockings. But the venue showed movies as well, making it one of the first wave of cinemas in Britain, a wave that was turning into a steady stream by 1916, as more and more people began to want to see ‘moving pictures’.*

If some of the very first purpose-built cinemas were rather anonymous-looking buildings with little to identify them apart from large boards for posters advertising what was showing, some adopted a theatrical look, or were indeed converted theatres or dual-purpose buildings like the Palace. Already, some people were starting to realise that a showy or glamorous looking facade with features like the Palace’s tower and dome, and its round window, decorative swags, and classical pilasters, helped draw the eye and bring in the customers.† A good 700 people per screening were accommodated in the interwar period, followed by many members of the armed forces when it became an ENSA venue during World War II.¶ But afterwards it was less successful, as going out to a film was steadily replaced by staying in and watching television. After a long period unused in the 1980s and 1990s, the Palace became a night club, like many of its kind. It may look a little dishevelled, but it’s still an eye-catcher.

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* Britain’s first cinema opened in London’s Regent Street in 1896. By 1909 the wave was starting to break, with cinemas in places as diverse as Birmingham and Colwyn Bay.

† It was said originally to have been in the Moorish style; I wonder if that means the interior. The outside seems solidly Classical.

¶ ENSA: Entertainments National Service Association, set up to provide entertainment for members of the forces during the war.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

Celluladies

It was back in 2014 when last I posted about a relief on the building that was once Cheltenham’s Odeon Cinema, and before that its Gaumont cinema: a pair of naked women, tangled in curls of celluloid, who’d been removed from the building’s facade prior to its demolition. Back then, I wrote this about the sculpture:

These relief panels are by Newbury Abbot Trent, a prolific sculptor who produced many war memorials. He was the brother (or, according to some sources, the cousin) of the cinema’s architect, W. E. Trent. The panels are the kind of thing that often adorned cinema buildings of the 1930s, although they were often carved in stone, with a more neutral surface than the shiny metallic finish of these Cheltenham examples. Such sculptures often show female figures – always glamorous, often naked, sometimes, like these, with exaggerated proportions – and were meant to entice us into the magic and seductive world of the cinema, at a time when only a tiny minority had television and cinema-going was a regular weekly recreation for millions. When they were new, shiny, and properly lit, they would have reminded film-goers and passers-by alike of the magical, flickering world inside. It’s a shame they are no longer there.

Several times since, I’ve had the chance to admire this piece of work in its new setting, at ground level, where it can be studied in much more detail and where it is protected by a transparent covering. It’s great to be able to see these ladies from close quarters. I’d been vague about the material when writing about them in their original location, high above the pavement, referring just to their ‘metallic’ surface. For ‘metallic’ read ‘metallic-looking’. They actually are carved out of stone, but stone has been painted to resemble silvery steel or aluminium. At eye level their surface still looks shiny, but also grainier. The details of the carving also look rather coarser – after all, the sculpture was never intended to be seen from so close. It’s still good that it were preserved, though. It’s a bit of Cheltenham history and part of the career of a notable sculptor whose work, so often attached to buildings (and cinemas above all), is frequently vulnerable to the demolition ball or the contractor’s hammer. With their exaggerated figures, sleek hair-dos, and filmic context, the women are very Art Deco and very evocative. Let’s raise a glass (filled with a cocktail of our choice, of course) to their creator.

The sculptures in situ on the front of the cinema (now demolished)

Maida Vale, London

Old building, new use

I sometimes say in my posts that such and such a building ‘caught my eye’. There can be few more eye-catching buildings than this one, standing out in its whiteness between trees in leafy Maida Vale. It began life in 1912 as the Maida Vale Picture House and carried on as a cinema until 1949. Since then it has been a dance hall, a casino and bingo hall – and since 1998 a mosque, the Islamic Centre of England.

Relatively little work was needed to convert the building, and most of the changes are architecturally cosmetic – although of great importance to the building’s current users: specifically the addition of calligraphic panels and the covering-up of statues in what was the auditorium and is now the prayer hall. The work has been done with sensitivity and one can still appreciate the architecture of the original cinema – the two towers with their domes, the white frontage with its round windows with ornate surrounds.

It is good both that this important early cinema has been preserved and that it has found a new use – often a challenge when so many old buildings seem worth keeping but difficult to find a role for. It’s worth looking out for – even if just from the top of a bus.

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For some of the information in this post, I am indebted to the a new book from Historic England: Shahed Salem, The British Mosque. I plan to review this book later in the year.

Shaftesbury Avenue, London

Hats off, here they come…

London’s Shaftesbury Avenue is one of the best known streets in the capital – the part between Piccadilly Circus and Cambridge Circus, which is full of theatres, is in the heart of tourist London. But the northern part, north of Cambridge Circus and bordering the Covent Garden area is less well known. If you’re around there, I’d suggest wandering towards the northern end, and having a look at the Covent Garden Odeon, a large Art Deco building that started life as the Saville Theatre in 1931.  

The reason I think this building is particularly worth a look is the long frieze that stretches across the facade. It’s the work of the sculptor Gilbert Bayes* and depicts theatre through the ages, with the ancient Greeks and Romans at one end and the twentieth century at the other. ‘Theatre’ is interpreted loosely (spectacle might be a better term), with Roman gladiators and Greek Bacchantes included and the very English sight of Punch and Judy also putting in an appearance.

I’ve chosen two sections of the panel.§ The first shows some wonderful horses from the Roman section and a group of fetching Bacchantes (plus, presumably, one of Bacchus’ pards) on the right. The naked Bacchantes have a period, Art Deco look, with their short hair and slim bodies. One can feel Bayes having fun with all these subjects, relishing the chance to depict the naked female form and the opportunity to include animals.

The second panel includes another group of women: the Bacchantes have become tamed, as it were, as 1920s dancers, with clingy dresses and feathered headdresses – one can imagine them coming down the staircase behind Imelda Staunton in the wonderful current National Theatre production of Stephen Sondheim’s Follies. To their left are a bunch of ‘Romantics’ from the 19th century including a variety of actors in period costumes. Further left still is a Punch and Judy booth in which Punch looks down at a lifeless puppet – presumably the unfortunate Judy – while the dog Toby sits on the ground beneath; Punch and Judy were famously ‘born’ a few hundred yards southwest of here, in the heart of Covent Garden.†

There’s much to admire in these fine panels, and in some roundels by Bayes set further up on the building. I’d encourage anyone walking along the northern part of Shaftesbury Avenue to look up at the relief and take it in. Although the frieze is very large, many passers-by miss it when looking to see what films are playing, rather as people quite understandably miss the details above shop fronts when looking in shop windows. It’s another example of the use of sculpture to give interest to an otherwise rather large and lumpish 1930s theatre facade – something I’ve noticed on early Odeons and other cinemas several times before. More modern corporations should consider giving space to the visual arts in this way. ¶

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* Bayes also did the panels showing ‘merfiremen’ adorning the London Fire Brigade Building on Albert Embankment. 

§ More detail in each photograph will be revealed if you click on the image.

† The first written account of a Punch and Judy show was a record of a performance in Covent Garden. Punch’s ‘birthday’ is regularly celebrated in May in St Paul’s churchyard, when the massed ranked of the ‘professors’’ booths fill the greensward and the walls echo to the sound of beswazzled voices.

¶ There are more pictures of the frieze on the Ornamental Passions blog, here.

Wisbech, Cambridgeshire

Deco memories (2)

Here is one more memory from my brief visit to Wisbech a year ago, and it is another Art Deco structure that probably gets overlooked by visitors – even those who appreciate architecture – this town being so rich in buildings from earlier eras. This is the Empire Theatre, built in 1932 to designs by F B Ward and C E A Woolnough. A lovely example of its type, it features symmetry, metal-framed windows with stunning geometrically pattern glazing bars, and jazz-age details like that central pinnacle – all things that we associate with this type of cinema, but which are all too rare these days.

I did not manage to get inside, which is a pity, because when I returned home I read that the Empire (now given over to bingo) has a magnificent period interior. And that is even rarer, as so many cinema and theatre interiors of the 1920s and 1930s have gone, often as a result of perfectly understandable moves to upgrade, convert, or modernize. Fortunately, there are images of this extraordinary interior online, revealing stylish plasterwork, luxurious inlaid wood, metal banisters, and all kinds of other details. No wonder the building has a grade II* listing. I hope the sustaining bingo business thrives.

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Addendum An Australian reader comments on the brownish stone cladding of this facade, which would be unusual on a movie theatre in Australia. It's not that common in the UK either. In my experience, British interwar cinemas are generally built of brick, with the entrance front often covered in stucco or sometimes clad in white ceramic tiles. Back, sides, and unregarded portions generally are usually left unclad: it's the entrance front that is meant to count, and to catch the eye. I've posted about a ceramic-clad cinema before and also one in which which the brickwork is left exposed (although on that occasion my main interest was a decorative element in the form  of a carved relief).    

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. 

Bath, Somerset

Other worlds

People sometimes ask me why I do not do more posts about interiors. There are various reasons. First of all: what most interests me about buildings is the face they present to the world – not just how they look from the outside, but also how they relate to their surroundings and how they enhance (or not) our experience of townscape, villagescape, landscape, or whatever other kind of scape we find ourselves in. I also find it easier to take photographs of exteriors, and what I most like to do is show you one photograph that combines with a small piece of text that tries to sum up what I feel about the building. Although I sometimes can’t resist a church interior, interiors on the whole are another country (if not another world) and I’d have to do things differently there.

But now and then there’s nothing like an exception to prove, as they say, the rule. A few weeks ago the Resident Wise Woman and I went to a concert in the Forum, Bath. I knew, from reading, that this was a former cinema and that it had some kind of art deco interior. But this information, plus the rather classical stone-clad exterior (this is Bath, after all) could not prepare me for the delights inside: a virtually complete art deco interior of 1933–4, with chromium-plated handrails, doors of fine woods (walnut, ebonized timber), all kinds of plasterwork embellishments, a classical frieze of naked warriors, and lighting (both concealed and visible fittings) to die for.

If ever there was a place, I’d thought, that sums up the glamour of the interwar cinema, it must be somewhere like the Muswell Hill Odeon (all streamlining and swirls). But for my money, the Forum knocks such places into a cocked hat. Only the mad Gothic interior of the Granada, Tooting (by the once-celebrated theatrical designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, whose very name takes one to other worlds) can compete. The architects of the Forum were a Bristol practice, W H Watkins and E Morgan Willmott, who were enthusiasts for American design – not just decoration influenced by the New World but also planning, including the generous splay of the fan-shaped, 2,000-seater auditorium. You can’t sum this sort of thing up in one picture, taken quickly before the house started to fill before the performance, so here is one image that catches, albeit inadequately, the plasterwork, the frieze, the rather Egyptian surround of the proscenium arch, and the use of colour; plus two details of a light fitting and a bit of incised plasterwork. I enjoyed the concert, but if it had not been so good I’d have had a good time anyway looking at my surroundings. Another world indeed.

Taunton, Somerset

Tangled up in film

Some people who know Taunton much better than I were surprised when I expressed admiration for the former cinema, originally the Gaumont Palace, a building of 1931–2 by W. T. Benslyn now given over to bingo. It’s a rather large mass of a building, in the solid Art Deco mode of many cinemas. Benslyn was something of a specialist in this kind of building and had been assistant to Robert Atkinson, designer of truly remarkable Art Deco foyer in the former Daily Express building in London’s Fleet Street, so he was absorbed in both Deco and decoration.

What attracted me in Taunton was precisely a bit of decoration: this sculpture, apparently called Love and Life Entangled in Film. Life, naked and female, raises an arm towards Love, a winged Cupid. The visual structure of the piece is provided by the figures – the curves made by Life’s body and both characters’ limbs. The counterpoint to this are the curling loops of celluloid and the flowing waves of Life’s hair. The combination produces a beautifully poised composition, although it needs some strong sunlight to make the relief stand out against the rather dull brick of the rest of the building and to help us pick out the details. Although parts of the carving (Love’s face, for example) are rather worn, the piece is still worth a good look.

I was pleased to see that the relief is signed. The name of the artist, Newbury Abbot Trent, specialist in the contrasting arts of cinema and war memorial sculpture, is one I’ve noticed on cinemas before. The theme of a female body entwined with film seems to have been a favourite. No doubt cinema proprietors thought such sirens would be effective advertising, a good image of the allure of film in the years between the world wars. Looking back now, they certainly seem to sum up the glamour of the cinema in those times. I’ve noticed three such sculptures recently – one in Oxford, this one in Taunton, and one in Cheltenham. The first is still a cinema, the second a bingo hall, and the third has been demolished. Where they survive, then, Trent’s reliefs are a valuable link with their age.

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Please remember to click on the image to enlarge it.

Cheltenham, Gloucestershire

The ladies, vanishing

At some point in the last couple of weeks – I’m not sure exactly when the last bricks tumbled – Cheltenham’s former Odeon cinema, long closed, was finally demolished. It was a rather plain building, on the cusp of Art Deco and modernism in style, and had served the town for decades (first as the Gaumont Palace then as the Odeon) before a more up-to-date cinema opened in the town. It then lay empty for several years and it seems to have proved impossible to find a new use for the building. I blogged about it back in 2008, when I wrote:

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.

These relief panels are by Newbury Abbot Trent, a prolific sculptor who produced many war memorials. He was the brother (or, according to some sources, the cousin) of the cinema’s architect, W. E. Trent. The panels are the kind of thing that often adorned cinema buildings of the 1930s, although they were often carved in stone, with a more neutral surface than the shiny metallic finish of these Cheltenham examples. Such sculptures often show female figures – always glamorous, often naked, sometimes, like these, with exaggerated proportions – and were meant to entice us into the magic and seductive world of the cinema, at a time when only a tiny minority had television and cinema-going was a regular weekly recreation for millions. When they were new, shiny, and properly lit, they would have reminded film-goers and passers-by alike of the magical, flickering world inside. It’s a shame they are no longer there.

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Postscript 2018 I can somewhat belatedly report that these reliefs have been preserved. They are now displayed, at ground level, fittingly on the rear of the town's more recent cinema. Here they can be well appreciated and also entertain passing drivers on Chletenham's notorious inner ring road. I have been in a traffic queue next to them several times. 

Notting Hill Gate, London

What, has this thing appeared again tonight? (3)

My third New Year reprise, another post that has seen many visits since it was published, is a cinema that was originally a theatre. It celebrates the architects of the theatre-building boom of the late-Victorian and Edwardian periods, men who are admired as decorators, wielding putti, swags, and curvaceous light fittings with aplomb, but also au fait with sight lines, acoustics, and everything practical in the theatre from crush bars to crash bars. They probably deserve to be better known, and known for more than the boulevard baroque of their decorative style, but it was that, mostly, that I wrote about, back in September:

The Coronet, Notting Hill Gate, was once my local cinema. I must have passed it hundreds of times and have seen a few movies in it too, but it's a long while since I've actually looked at the building. Then, one day recently, I walked by as the morning sun was throwing its baroque plasterwork into delightful relief and I stopped and looked more closely. In truth, its design is a theatrical hybrid – a bit of Italian Renaissance (the arches in low relief), a lot of baroque (the swags, and much other detail), some non-specific classicism, some leaves that wouldn't be out of place on an Art Nouveau building.

It's theatrical to be sure, and the building was indeed designed originally as a theatre, in 1898. As early as 1916 is was converted to a cinema and a ready market for movies in West London has kept it going. I'd wondered whether it was by the architect Frank Matcham, who did so many highly ornate theatres that have kept me entertained over years, from London's vast Coliseum to Cheltenham's small but perfectly formed Everyman. It's not by Matcham, but by a designer who drank from the Matcham spring: W G R Sprague, himself a prolific architect of theatres in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Born in Australia and the son of an actress, Sprague seemed destined for the theatre. He worked for Matcham and for another theatre architect, Walter Emden, before teaming up with Bertie Crewe and designing theatres off his own bat. 

The facades of the Coronet show off well what Sprague liked to do – to create what he referred to as 'the free classical form'. From the Aldwych to the Gielgud, Wyndham's to the Ambassadors, Londoners can sample his work, keeping their eyes diverted before the lights go down. The Coronet, lit up by the morning sun, is a shining example of his style.

Notting Hill Gate, London

G'day!

The Coronet, Notting Hill Gate, was once my local cinema. I must have passed it hundreds of times and have seen a few movies in it too, but it's a long while since I've actually looked at the building. Then, one day recently, I walked by as the morning sun was throwing its baroque plasterwork into delightful relief and I stopped and looked more closely. In truth, its design is a theatrical hybrid – a bit of Italian Renaissance (the arches in low relief), a lot of baroque (the swags, and much other detail), some non-specific classicism, some leaves that wouldn't be out of place on an Art Nouveau building.

It's theatrical to be sure, and the building was indeed designed originally as a theatre, in 1898. As early as 1916 is was converted to a cinema and a ready market for movies in West London has kept it going. I'd wondered whether it was by the architect Frank Matcham, who did so many highly ornate theatres that have kept me entertained over years, from London's vast Coliseum to Cheltenham's small but perfectly formed Everyman. It's not by Matcham, but by a designer who drank from the Matcham spring: W G R Sprague, himself a prolific architect of theatres in the late-19th and early-20th centuries. Born in Australia and the son of an actress, Sprague seemed destined for the theatre. He worked for Matcham and for another theatre architect, Walter Emden, before teaming up with Bertie Crewe and designing theatres off his own bat.

The facades of the Coronet show off well what Sprague liked to do – to create what he referred to as 'the free classical form'. From the Aldwych to the Gielgud, Wyndham's to the Ambassadors, Londoners can sample his work, keeping their eyes diverted before the lights go down. The Coronet, lit up by the morning sun, is a shining example of his style.

Oxford

Screen goddess

I don't know anything about this relief. Positioned high on the wall of a cinema in a side street in Oxford, it may be by Newbury Trent, who did many carvings for cinemas. Its subject is a cousin of the curvaceous and silvery women who adorn a former cinema in Cheltenham and who were the subject of one of my previous posts (that Cheltenham building is still empty and yet more unkempt since I posted it back in 2008).

It's not the greatest piece of carving. The hands, elegant as they are, don't quite work for me, and, if you will pardon the expression, the breasts don't repay close examination. But I like her face, which seems to me to be sensitively carved, and the way the film snakes its way around the figure, part frame, part secular halo. The simplified tripartite wave of her hair is perhaps a signal that we should take the whole carving as designed to be looked at from some distance without the assistance of the zoom lens I used to take the photograph.

The relief is a relic of a time, the 1930s I suppose, when cinema was the epitome of glamour and modernity and when old established arts like sculpture could be brought to its service. Cinemas of the 1930s – along with contemporary factories and other buildings – were often decorated with this kind of carving. Such decoration forms a reaction to the minimalist modernism of buildings in the tradition of Le Corbusier – and ultimately of the Central European architect Adolf Loos† who declared that ornament is crime – and shows how buildings can be modern and ornamented at the same time. And if buildings connected with the arts cannot be a bit showy, what can?

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† Loos was born in Brno, another of those with Czech origins (think Freud, Mahler, Rilke) subsumed into the all-embracing Austro-Hungarian culture.