by Suggs
Having acquired half-price tickets as minors, we would then proceed to sit in the smoking section, on the backs of folded-up seats so as to look as tall as possible, but it didn’t always work. The eagle-eyed usherettes were wise to this ruse and before the film started they would scan the area left of the aisle for any shrimp-like creatures smoking cigarettes almost as big as their heads. If you felt the torch beam linger on your face for more than a second, the game was up and you would be ejected by the ear with an accompanying observation that you had to be 14 for junior admission and 16 to smoke and that you couldn’t have it both ways. Later, of course, the problem was reversed, as I tried to look 18 in order to get into X-rated movies.
Besides my north London favourites, we sometimes ventured further afield in search of celluloid fun. There were some really quirky cinemas around London in the 70s, and plenty of real dives, or flea-pits as they were infectiously known. Some had a bit of a reputation and, believe me, if a cinema did have a reputation it was best to be in the know.
The Eros Cinema, on the corner of Piccadilly Circus and Shaftesbury Avenue, seemed like a perfectly harmless place to while away an afternoon. After all, this bijou art deco picture house only screened classic cartoons. As with a lot of cinemas at the time, it had a rolling bill of features, which meant that when one cartoon ended, another began. So once you’d paid your entrance fee you could watch as many films as you liked. While I was enticed by the prospect of an endless bill, that wasn’t the main attraction for some of its clientele and I wonder whether I should’ve been paying more attention to the name of the place: it was, after all, a venue named after the god of lurve.
I ventured in and purchased my ticket. This was not printed up with information about the seat and time of the show plus your inside leg measurement and star sign, as we have come to expect, but like an old bus ticket printed on coarse, thick paper, just proving you had paid. In fact, I could have done with just a bit more info. The place was pretty busy, even at 3 p.m. on a Monday afternoon. But my mind was on the screen and a pomegranate my mum had bought me. An unusual item to take to the pictures, I’ll grant you, but I’d never seen one before and had been treasuring it for this moment, keen to find out what was inside the tough, waxy skin.
As it turned out, the pomegranate was not the only unusual occupant in the stalls. The Eros was one of the pick-up joints for the rent boys of Piccadilly Circus and their clients. I was in the dark about its notoriety, but after the auditorium lights dimmed and we were plunged into darkness, conversely I began to see the light. I think it would be fair to say that at the Eros most of the action took place at the back of the stalls rather than on the screen.
Removing the pomegranate from my trouser pocket, I groped around trying to tease my way into this mysterious fruit bursting with exotic promise. Unfortunately it refused to yield to my clumsy advances and shot out of my grasp and under the seat in front. Calamity! I had to retrieve it. But I moved too slowly, and as I left my seat and started to grope around under the seat in front of me, my pomegranate began its inexorable roll towards the screen and I followed it.
Why I decided to take a pomegranate to the cinema and not a bag of wine gums, I’ll never know. Perhaps it was going cheap and my mum was feeling the pinch. I certainly did. Whatever the reason for the fruit - and, by the way, how ahead of the times was my mum providing her son with such a healthy treat? - I’ll never forget that first pomegranate. It is forever associated in my memory with the unexpected sights, and sounds, of the stalls on my one and only visit to the Eros. I suppose it’s a kind of Pavlovian moment, only I don’t have to taste a pomegranate, I just have to see one and my mind immediately conjures up a recollection of . . . cartoons.
Today the building which housed the cinema is a Gap clothing store, but if you want to catch a glimpse of the Eros my pomegranate and I knew, here’s a bit of trivia: the cinema’s exterior was used in the final sequence of An American Werewolf in London. Ah-hoooo! That’s got to be showing somewhere on an endless bill.
These days, of course, a trip to the cinema can be a pretty luxurious affair: plush seats, air conditioning, tasty refreshments, including, no doubt, pomegranate juice (which would’ve saved me a whole lot of trouble). Sometimes they even throw in a decent film as well, just to complete the package. But on the whole, today’s cinemas are comfortable rather than flamboyant, with none of the character of their distinguished forebears. It was all very different at the beginning of the last century, when moving pictures first seized the imagination of London’s entertainment-seekers.
Back in the first decade of the twentieth century, films were shown in old music halls, disused shops, fairgrounds and even railway arches, as there weren’t any purpose-built cinemas. A trip to the flicks was a pretty risky business in those days because nitrate film stock was highly flammable and could burn even underwater. Following a string of fires in the early 1900s, the government decided enough was enough and introduced an Act of Parliament to protect filmgoers from the risk of going up in flames. Fire-resistant projection booths were required from then on, and this put an end to makeshift cinemas and sparked a picture-house building boom.
Within months, London was awash with purpose-built cinemas, many of which had the word ‘Electric’ in their names, which reveals much about the novelty of electricity back then. Indeed, the oldest surviving purpose-built cinema is the Electric on Portobello Road in west London. The projectors started turning there in 1910 and today it’s still one of London’s smartest picture houses. Among the other handful which are still in business are the Electric Pavilion in Brixton, now known as the Ritzy, and the Empress Electric in Islington. This one’s dropped the ‘electric’ moniker as well and is today called the Screen on the Green, the scene of many an all-night Clint Eastwood fest. All of them have had to weather many storms to make it through to the twenty-first century.
Most of the purpose-built early cinemas, like the three above, were all very similar in style, with barrel-vaulted ceilings and richly decorated auditoriums all on one level. Others, which were converted from other buildings, vary in style. If you take a trip to Notting Hill Gate you’ll find two examples not more than a few yards from one another: the Gate cinema and the Coronet. The former, located at 87 Notting Hill Gate, at first glance looks far less impressive than its grand rival, but beyond its drab facade lurks a glorious auditorium with ornate panelled walls and a coffered ceiling with decorative Edwardian plasterwork. The Gate underwent a programme of refurbishment in 2004, including the installation of plush velvet seating and some additional double ‘love’ seats. I don’t know if this is a nod to the Gate’s decadent, racy past, but in 1879 the building operated as the Golden Bells Hotel, an upmarket brothel. A surviving register from 1911, the year the ‘hotel’ swapped red lights for house lights and was converted to a cinema, reveals that trade that year was still brisk, with over 100 gentlemen booking in to its 15 rooms in one day. However, after the bell tolled for the hotel, the Gate began life as the - surprise, surprise - Electric Cinema before switching to the Embassy in 1931. The cinema’s anonymous facade is the result of Second World War bombing which destroyed the original exterior, including its ornate domed roof.
However, if it’s a domed roof you want then you only need to head left out of the Gate’s front doors and wander past half a dozen shops to the corner of Notting Hill Gate and Hillgate Street. Here you’ll find the splendid Coronet Cinema. The facade of the Coronet is quite striking, with painted stone, giant classical pilasters and a short round tower crowned by said dome. Originally built as a theatre in 1898, the Coronet became a cinema in 1923 and was designed by W. G. R. Sprague, the architect responsible for the earlier mentioned Camden Palace, who was a prolific theatre designer and spent four years articled to the great Frank Matcham. Two of Sprague’s most notable creations are the Aldwych and Wyndham’s in the West End, but this one’s a little cracker too and pretty much in original nick, despite a few scares over the years, such as
demolition threats and plans to convert it to a McDonald’s. A second cinema was built on the stage of the theatre in 1993, thus keeping the main auditorium intact.
The Coronet has had a cameo role in several adverts and films over the years, including a scene in Richard Curtis’s Notting Hill featuring Hugh Grant and Julia Roberts who were doubtless blown away, as was I, by the auditorium’s ‘plaster ornaments in Louis XVI manner; two elliptically-curved balconies; and square enriched architrave to the proscenium’. There, now you know, but you don’t have to be au fait with the technical details to have your head turned by the Coronet’s charms: it’s as pretty as a picture house can be, even if it didn’t begin life as such.
Capacity in the early cinemas rarely exceeded 600 and if you fancied sitting in the posh, padded tip-up seats it would cost you a shilling, payable at the entry box, which was open to the street. If, however, you only had threepence to spare, it would buy you a lowly place on a bench situated at the front of the auditorium. Just to add insult to ignominy, you’d also be made to enter the cinema through a separate side entrance. Oh, the shame! But if you think three old pennies was the cheapest admission, you’d be mistaken. Some cinemas allowed admittance in exchange for empty jam jars. I don’t know if these cinemas were run by the WI as a sideline or whether they were an offshoot of Tiptree Jam, but clearly glass had a price. I wonder if an empty jar of Duchy Originals Organic might get me a plush seat today? Actually, forget the big conglomerates like the WI. Ownership of the first purpose-built cinemas was largely in private hands, but small chains did emerge in those fledgling days. A gentleman glorying in the name of Montagu Pyke was one of the early pioneers of chain cinemas and had several picture houses around London. He even has a Weatherspoon pub named after him on Charing Cross Road, which stands on the site of the last cinema he built. Make mine a double bill!
Of course, the films back then were silent and accompaniment was provided by a pianist or a small orchestra. Despite the relatively primitive nature of the early films, according to modern tastes at least, cinema caught on in a big way and when the talkies arrived in the late 1920s it became even bigger. This meant that most of the early cinemas degenerated into flea-pits, as they were unable to compete with the huge, temple-like movie theatres that began to go up. Most have gone, of course, while others found new uses, like the Rivoli on Brockley Road opposite Crofton Park Station in south London, which was converted into a ballroom when the craze really took hold in the 50s.
The Rivoli began life as the Crofton Park Picture Palace in 1913 and was built in the style of the Electric cinemas I mentioned earlier. It remained independently owned throughout its time as a cinema, having become the Rivoli in 1931. The last waltz for the Rivoli as a picture house came in 1957, and it ended with a double bill featuring The Nat King Cole Story and Reach for the Sky, the Douglas Bader biopic starring Kenneth More. Today the Rivoli’s a glorious mix of art nouveau elegance and fabulous 50s kitsch and is, remarkably, one of London’s last, if not the last, remaining public ballroom.
I’ve always had my own rather particular style of dancing, and although I’ve heard it called many other things, it didn’t stop me from shuffling into a few ballrooms during my youth. In the late 1970s I used to be a regular at the Gresham in Archway, north London, which was one of a series of dance halls catering for émigré Irish men and women. I would always arrive late on Saturday nights. However, I didn’t necessarily go for the dancing: no, I acquired my dance-hall habit on account of the draconian licensing laws that prevented pubs from selling alcohol after 11 p.m. These ballrooms were oases in a desert of dryness for thirsty teenagers because, for some strange reason, they were permitted to sell alcohol way past last orders, which was why they attracted Daniel Farson and were also a draw for young, adventurous men like me.
These venues were traditional Irish dance halls and felt like they had been transported lock, stock and Guinness barrel from rural Ireland. Men would stand on one side of the hall, jackets off, in white shirts and ties, eyeing up the women opposite, and when enough drink had relaxed the atmosphere they would approach the girls and ask for a dance. Even for an urban yobbo like me, it was a charming reminder of days gone by. I don’t think many youngsters bother with preliminaries like that any more. In those days girls were probably warned by their mothers to be careful about having a dance with a stranger because it might lead to, well, you know . . . courtship!
Some of the large art deco cinemas that took London by storm in the 1930s were, as I mentioned earlier, still functioning when I was in my early teens, but they were pretty run down and either on the way out completely or about to get a multiplex makeover. What I didn’t realise then, of course, was that these vast, usually empty, single-screen cinemas were among the last of a breed that began dying out from the late 50s onwards, when television began to rule the entertainment roost. When I later played the Hammersmith Odeon with Madness, which became a music venue in the early 60s, it was hard to take in that this place was once a cinema because it was so massive. I simply couldn’t imagine 3,500 people sitting in this auditorium all watching the same film. It really hit home just how big an attraction the cinema was when these places were built. Apparently, 23 million people went to the cinema each week in the UK in the 1930s which, in old money, was half the population. It was such a regular weekly event that people rarely checked what was on before they set off. So let’s rewind to those times.
When the talkies arrived in 1928 so too did the big three national chains - Gaumont, Odeon and Associated British Cinemas - and the next decade saw the great age of cinema-building. These weren’t just any old cinemas, they were escapist fantasies with marble staircases, glittering chandeliers and uniformed staff. Some were built in the style of Egyptian temples while the art deco Odeon cinemas became the embodiment of 1930s architecture.
Hollywood films were big business back then, and the chain cinemas made a point of ensuring that the fantasy world their patrons saw on the screen was matched by the interiors of their picture houses. Many of London’s big, luxury cinemas have long gone with the wind, but it’s not a total disaster movie on the giant 1930s cinema front: salvation for some arrived through religion, bingo or rock’n’roll, so thankfully the Big Smoke still has some blockbusting examples to feast your eyes on.
The Brixton Astoria is regarded as the first ‘atmospheric’ super cinema and had room for 3,000 patrons when it first opened its doors in 1929. Built in the Italian Renaissance style, the cinema was taken over by the Odeon group in the 30s, but it had to reinvent itself several times in order to stay standing. Today it can accommodate 5,000 screaming patrons, having had the seats in the stalls removed, and is, of course, now known as the Brixton Academy. It became a concert venue in 1982, having spent many years as a demolition-threatened warehouse. Fortunately, unlike most ageing film stars, the Academy never lost its looks: it’s managed to retain most of its original features and underwent extensive renovation work a couple of years ago. It’s now a Grade II listed building, so it should be around in all its 1929 glory for decades to come.
The Academy was pretty massive, but it wasn’t the biggest cinema back then. That accolade goes to the Gaumont State Cinema in Kilburn, which had room for over 4,000 punters. The State is currently empty, having served time as a ballroom and bingo hall, but salvation of a sort is just around the corner. When you are looking to save an old gem like the Gaumont State, you’ve got to think big and you can’t think much bigger than God. Turning its back on lascivious dancing, the devil’s music and gambling, the Gaumont State is set to become a church. It’s a remarkable art deco building and Kilburn’s most identifiable landmark, with its 120-foot skyscraper tower - modelled on the Empire State Building - which once used to house a fully equipped radio studio. The interior isn’t too shabby either, with its huge, gilded foyer complete with a vast chandelier that’s a replica of one that illuminates the banqueting hall at Buckingham Palace.
I’ve mentioned that London
scored a few notable firsts when it came to cinemas and moving pictures, and this trend has continued into the twenty-first century. The Granada Cinema in Tooting has recently been awarded a Grade I listing by English Heritage and is the first cinema in Britain to receive this accolade, which puts it in the same bracket as the Tower of London, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament.
Built in 1931, it will come as no surprise that, with room for over 3,000 punters, this picture palace ceased to function as a cinema long ago. In its heyday more than three million people came to watch films at the Granada, but the number of patrons attending each year had dropped to just 600 a week by 1971. By anyone’s calculation, that’s one heck of a reduction. The Granada had occasionally moonlighted as a concert venue over the years and played host to an array of stars ranging from the Andrews Sisters to Jerry Lee Lewis. Even the great Frank Sinatra played consecutive nights here when he was on the comeback trail in 1953.
But there was to be no comeback for the Granada as a cinema after 1973 when the final curtain fell following a week’s screening of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Things might have turned ugly for the Granada if plans to build an office block on the site had gone ahead. But, perhaps taking the lead from their famous fictional son Citizen ‘Wolfie’ Smith, star of the Robert Lindsay sitcom that brought a satire on left-wing politics into our front rooms in the 70s, the good folks of Tooting were up in arms about the plans and threatened to revolt. Fortunately, the local council saw sense and slapped a preservation order on the cinema. As Wolfie used to cry, ‘Power to the people!’
The Granada eventually became a bingo hall in 1976. Why was it that bingo came to the rescue of so many cinemas? Luck really. The decline in cinema attendances coincided with the liberalisation of the gaming laws in 1960, which allowed commercial bingo halls to set up. Bingo became hugely popular and big venues were required by companies such as Mecca. Empty cinemas fitted the bill perfectly and, fortunately, the transition generally didn’t do too much damage to the fabric of the buildings. At the Granada, for example, only the seats in the stalls needed to be removed in order to make the house a home for the bingo brigade, which is more than a relief because the place is a treasure.
