Category Archives: Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry

Elite cinema

Leave a Reply
Former Elite Cinema, Nottingham

Former Elite Cinema, Nottingham

Diagonally opposite Nottingham’s Theatre Royal, the town’s prestige entertainment building of the mid-nineteenth century, stands the Elite Cinema, aptly and no doubt deliberately named as the city’s premier picture palace of the early 1920s.

This huge building, clad in white Hathern faience with an elaborate display of statuary on its parapet, was designed by James E Adamson of the architectural practice Adamson & Kinns.

The foyer welcomed patrons with a roaring open fire in the winter months, and there were two “swift and soft-running passenger elevators” to the upper levels.

The auditorium, a confection in the style and colouring of Wedgwood ware, with trompe l’oeil arches and portrait medallions, brought a new level of quality and luxury beyond the picture palaces that had opened before the Great War.

The Elite had a magnificent Willis & Lewis organ, “the largest and most complete instrument that has been built for any cinema in the British Isles”.

The building was intended not only to show movies, but to build a separate reputation as a social and business venue.  A suite of dining spaces offered catering for individuals and groups.

The Louis XVI Café, white, green and gold, decorated with tapestries, contained a Soda Fountain “of the latest pattern”.  The larger of two cafés on the second floor was decorated in Jacobean style.  On the third floor there was another large room in Georgian style, “a thoroughly joyous room” decorated in a “daring” white and yellow scheme, and a smaller companion called the Dutch Café, “adorned by a very attractive hand-painted frieze illustrating scenes from favourite fairy tales”.

The entire building was cleaned by a Stuyvesant Engineer centralised vacuum cleaner, “sucking up ravenously every particle of dust and small refuse and depositing it all, via a suction hose, in a central dustbin”, and in the aftermath of the Spanish Flu epidemic, the heating and ventilation system was designed so “that the ubiquitous influenza bacilli and their kin will have a difficult task to make both ends meet”.

It opened on August 22nd 1921, and became part of the ABC circuit in 1935.  Though repeatedly refurbished in the 1950s, it gradually lost its prestige as the years went by.

Much of the décor survives because the Elite was listed as long ago as 1972, and was subsequently upgraded from Grade II to Grade II*.

The auditorium and café areas are described in the English Heritage listing [http://www.britishlistedbuildings.co.uk/en-457422-elite-building-#.VgQggDZdHcs],

The fact that the Elite went over to bingo in 1977 helped to keep the place in good order, and after the demise of bingo in the 1990s the auditorium became a night-club.

The building was advertised for sale at a price of £4¼ million in June 2015.

Steaming out of Whitby

Leave a Reply
North Yorkshire Moors Railway, outside Whitby station: BR locomotive 76079

North Yorkshire Moors Railway, outside Whitby station: BR locomotive 76079

The North Yorkshire Moors Railway is one of the premier heritage lines in Britain, started up in 1973, seven years after the British Railways service closed down.

It runs from Grosmont, the junction with the Esk Valley line, south to Pickering. It has spectacular moorland scenery, beautifully preserved stations, authentic rolling stock that is kept in good order and a fleet of powerful tender locomotives that can tackle steep gradients.

Its greatest asset of all, however, is its army of volunteers. Stations and trains are well staffed, so that the public is well looked after. The railway offers a warm welcome, decent catering and unobtrusive shopping opportunities to holidaymakers and rail enthusiasts alike.

Among the many preserved railways up and down the land, the NYMR is at the top of the game, alongside such lines as the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway and the Severn Valley Railway.

Travelling between Whitby and Pickering and back in either direction is a full day out, and there’s time to make at least one break of journey. Grosmont station gives access to the locomotive works through the original tunnel of the horse-drawn Whitby & Pickering Railway; Goathland, made famous by the TV programme Heartbeat, is irresistibly picturesque.

The re-entry of steam trains into Whitby is a huge success, and line-capacity has been improved by bringing a second platform back into use. Collaboration between the local authorities, Network Rail and the NYMR has created a win-win situation, boosting the local economy and bringing pleasure to thousands.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Whitby Station

Leave a Reply
Railway Station, Whitby, North Yorkshire

Railway Station, Whitby, North Yorkshire

Whitby’s railway station is an imposing building that, like the line that serves it, has survived a succession of threats.

It was built in 1845 by the house architect of the York & North Midland Railway, George Townsend Andrews (1804–1855), to replace an earlier terminus for the primitive, horse-drawn Whitby & Pickering Railway, engineered by George Stephenson in 1836.

From the 1880s to the late 1950s, Whitby station served four different railway lines, the original main line to Pickering and on to York, the Esk Valley line to Middlesbrough and the two coastal lines south to Scarborough and northwards to Loftus.

Dr Beeching would have shut all four of them, but the difficulties of providing replacement buses in the Esk valley meant that the circuitous and picturesque line via Battersby remained open, even though an eccentricity of railway geography has meant that every train down the line has reversed at Battersby since 1954.

Whitby’s rail connection to the rest of the country has been tenuous for decades, and it’s still not good: there are only four trains a day to Middlesbrough, the first starting its 1¼-hour journey at 0850.

However, the enterprising North Yorkshire Moors Railway has negotiated rights over Network Rail tracks from its junction at Grosmont into Whitby, so that it’s again possible to travel by steam between Whitby and Pickering in the summer months.

And you can get a proper breakfast at the Whistlestop Café in G T Andrews’ original station building.

The bikers congregate there so it must be good.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Cathedral of the movies

1 Reply

Granada Cinema, Tooting, London

Granada Cinema, Tooting, London

When David Atwell wrote the first detailed account of cinema architecture in Britain, Cathedrals of the Movies (Architectural Press 1980), the front-cover illustration was of the Granada Cinema, Tooting, in south London.

The Granada cinema chain was founded by the brothers Sidney and Cecil Bernstein, and they named their company as a result of a walking holiday in Spain.

They employed a Russian emigré theatre-director, Theodore Komisarjevsky, to design a series of purpose-built cinemas, starting in Dover in 1930.

The Tooting Granada, built in 1931, was the flagship.

Its exterior shell was designed in a discreet Moderne manner by Cecil Aubrey Masey. Within, Komisarjevsky provided an utterly magnificent, Venetian extravaganza with a baronial hall and minstrels’ gallery in the foyer, a hall of mirrors in the circle lobby and a 3,104-seat auditorium with a coffered roof, Gothic tracery decoration and a cusped proscenium arch.

It had, and still has, a Wurlitzer organ bought second-hand from the Majestic Theater, Sacramento, California and subsequently enlarged.

All this was planted in a workaday part of south London, near the local tube station. Londoners came off the street into a palazzo of the pictures, inspired by the Doge’s Palace, the Ca d’Oro, and the Palazzi Cavalli, Pizini and Foscari.

Not that they needed to know the cultural references. Komisarjevsky and his left-leaning clients believed that ordinary people deserved the best that could be provided, and economies of scale made that possible.

In the opening-day brochure for the broadly similar Granada Cinema, Woolwich (1937) Komisarjevsky wrote –

The picture theatre supplies folk with the flavour of romance for which they crave. The richly decorated theatre, the comfort with which they are surrounded, the efficiency of the service contribute to an atmosphere and a sense of well-being of which the majority have hitherto only imagined. While there they can with reason consider themselves as good as anyone, and are able to enjoy their cigarettes or their little love affairs in comfortable seats amidst attractive and appealing surroundings.

In the pre-war period the Tooting Granada could easily fill three full houses a day.

It was the first British cinema to be listed Grade II*, in 1972, and the first to be upgraded to Grade I in 2000.

The building is no longer a Granada. It’s now operated by the Gala Bingo chain [http://www.galabingo.com/clubs/tooting], which takes good care of it.

There are images of the parts of the building that the public don’t reach at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/granada-cinema-tooting-july-2015.t98224.

 

Majestic picture palace

Leave a Reply

Former Majestic Cinema, City Square, Leeds (June 2015)

Former Majestic Cinema, City Square, Leeds (June 2015)

A highlight for me of the Abbeydale Picture House Revival weekend was watching the first film ever shown there, The Call of the Road, with Vincente Stienlet, the grandson of the architect of the building, Pascal J Stienlet. As Mr Stienlet pointed out afterwards, his grandparents almost certainly watched the same film, in the same space, on the opening night in December 1920.

There is, to our mutual regret, no material about the Abbeydale in the archive of the Pascal J Stienlet & Son practice. However, Mr Stienlet showed me some fascinating images and plans of what was probably Pascal Stienlet’s largest cinema commission, the Majestic Cinema, City Square, Leeds.

The old Majestic is a much loved Leeds landmark. Designed by Pascal Stienlet in partnership with Joseph C Maxwell, and opened in June 1922, its dignified Beaux Arts façade, of Burmantofts ‘Marmo’ terracotta, is a delicate cream which for years was darkened by Leeds’ polluted atmosphere.

In the 2,600-seat auditorium, giant fluted Ionic columns and a Grecian frieze based on the Parthenon supported a coffered dome 84 feet in diameter. On either side of the proscenium were the pipes of the three-manual Vincent organ. In the basement below was a restaurant 110 feet × 110 feet with a sprung floor for dancing.

The Majestic became part of the Gaumont chain in 1929, and remained a premier film venue well into the 1960s – its run of The Sound of Music extended from April 1965 to September 1967 – but it went over to bingo in 1969. It’s unusual among city-centre cinemas because it was never subdivided. It was listed Grade II in 1993.

In 1997 the entire building became two night-clubs, the Majestyk in the auditorium and Jumpin’ Jacks in the ballroom below.

It was closed in 2006; an application for a casino licence was refused and the site became vacant.

In 2011 the Leeds developer Rushbond financed a clever refurbishment for retail use.

When the redeveloped building was almost ready for opening it caught fire on the evening of September 30th 2014. The fire brigade declared a major incident, closed off much of the city centre for over twelve hours, and by their skill and good judgement, though they lost the roof, saved the exterior walls.

Within a matter of days a 32-year-old man was arrested in connection with his suspicious behaviour at the scene. He was cleared of all charges in March 2015: http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/leeds-majestic-blaze-man-cleared-of-arson-charges-1-7183724.

It remains to be seen what happens next. Yorkshire Post images [http://www.yorkshirepost.co.uk/news/main-topics/local-stories/what-sparked-majestic-inferno-1-6872539] suggest that at least some of the interior remained intact.

The story of the Majestic is neatly encapsulated in a Yorkshire Evening Post article – http://www.yorkshireeveningpost.co.uk/news/latest-news/top-stories/proud-history-of-a-leeds-landmark-1-6871416 – and there is an illustration of the interior in original condition at http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2718.

Abbeydale Picture House Film Revival

3 Replies

Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield: Film Revival, Sunday July 18th 2015

Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield: Film Revival, Sunday July 18th-19th 2015

Photos:  Scott Hukins [SCOTT HUKINS : PHOTOGRAPHER (wordpress.com)]

For the first time in forty years, a sizeable audience sat in the stalls of the Abbeydale Picture House, Sheffield’s finest surviving suburban cinema, and watched feature films on the big screen over the weekend of July 18th-19th 2015:  Picture House Revival – Exposed Magazine

Thanks to the inspired vision of the arts platform Hand Of, run by three recent Sheffield graduates, Rob Hughes, Louise Snape and Ismar Badzic, several hundred people – some of them from surprisingly far afield – experienced this very special building doing what it was designed to do, making people happy.

Pullman-style seats – more comfortable than the originals – were installed, together with three bars, one of which sold sarsaparilla, the traditional temperance drink of pre-1960s Sheffield. Outside in the car-park there was a rich choice of street food and cakes; in the foyer, the distinctive fragrance of popcorn hung in the air.

The choice of films touched on Yorkshire’s film heritage – Brassed Off (1996) and Four Lions (2010) – and the Abbeydale’s heyday – two Laurel & Hardy titles, the short Brats (1930) and the feature A Chump at Oxford (1940), together with the first feature-film ever shown at the Abbeydale on its opening night, December 20th 1920, The Call of the Road, starring the British boxer-turned-actor Victor McLaglen.

The Call of the Road was a very special opportunity to see a silent movie as it was originally presented, on a big screen, with a fully improvised piano accompaniment by the virtuoso Jonathan Best.  Any other experience of pre-1929 feature films pales in comparison with watching a clear print, run at the correct speed, with live musical accompaniment in a crowded auditorium.

The afternoon was made even more special by the presence in the audience of Vincente Stienlet, grandson of Pascal J Stienlet who designed the building, and Cynthia Allen McLaglen, the niece of the film-star Victor McLaglen.

The Abbeydale has been very lucky in its owners since 1975 – the office-equipment dealers A & F Drake Ltd who found a use for the place into the early 1990s, the Friends of the Abbeydale Picture House who made use of it up to 2012, and the current owner Phil Robins who is developing it as a multipurpose community venue.

The Picture House Revival was a huge step forward in bringing the place back to life. Thanks to Rob, Louise and Ismar, the place was lit up on Saturday and Sunday evening, and after the end of the show crowds of people poured out on to the street, smiling.

Fit for a bishop

Leave a Reply
St Hilda's Parish Church, West Cliff, Whitby

St Hilda’s Parish Church, West Cliff, Whitby

Churches, like other buildings, don’t get built by accident. They owe their existence to someone’s drive and strength of intention.

On the opposite cliff to the splendidly archaic parish church of St Mary, Whitby, stands the magnificent late-Victorian Gothic church of St Hilda.

Built to serve the Victorian streets of the West Cliff, St Hilda’s is an impressive Gothic Revival composition of 1884-6 by the Newcastle architect, R J Johnson.

It replaced an iron church at the instigation of an ambitious rector, Rev Canon George Austen, who had arrived in Whitby in 1875 from Middlesburgh, where he had initiated a church-building programme [http://www.st-barnabas.net/history], and saw no reason why Whitby and its surrounding parishes should not become a bishopric.

Consequently, St Hilda’s is fit for a bishop, embellished with fine carving and glass by C E Kempe.

The bishop’s throne was installed c1908, and the first suffragan Bishop of Whitby was eventually appointed in 1923, by which time George Austen had become a Chancellor of York Minster.

When he died, aged 94, in 1933 he was, at his own request, brought back to Whitby and buried in the churchyard of St Mary’s, which had otherwise been closed to burials for sixty years.

The tower of St Hilda’s, in the style of the late-Victorian church, was completed by G E Charlewood in 1938

The fine Roman Catholic parish church by Matthew Ellison Hadfield (1867) in the town centre is also dedicated to St Hilda – a source of perennial confusion to visitors.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Whitby West Cliff

Leave a Reply
Whitby West Cliff: Royal Crescent

Whitby West Cliff: Royal Crescent

For a place that has always been far out of the way, Whitby has a remarkable tenacity as a holiday resort.

Even before the early arrival of the railway, the Whitby Public Baths Company tried to promote sea-bathing at the foot of the West Pier, where baths were “replenished with the purest sea and fresh water; and are fitted up with the greatest regard both for the comfort of the valetudinarian and the gratification of the pleasurist”.

A further attempt to utilise another spring led to the building of the Victoria Spa in Bagdale in 1844. Neither of these projects was a lasting success.

A locally-sponsored Whitby Building Company issued a prospectus proposing fourteen lodging-houses on the West Cliff Fields in 1843.

The following year George Hudson, the “Railway King”, who had taken over the Whitby & Pickering Railway, purchased the West Cliff Fields, apparently to establish an interest in the town that would enable him to become its MP. (In fact, he was elected as Conservative MP for Sunderland, where he was expected to promote the Monkwearmouth Dock and the Durham and Sunderland Railway, in 1845, and the Whitby seat went to his associate, the engineer Robert Stephenson, who was returned unopposed in 1847.)

Hudson proceeded, under the auspices of the York Building Company, to construct boarding houses and hotels as a speculation.

By the time East Terrace was finished so was Hudson, discredited by his manipulation of railway finances.

Whitby achieved modest growth as a resort: its population grew from 10,989 to 12,051 between the 1851 and 1861 censuses. Mrs Elizabeth Gaskell stayed here in 1859, and accumulated background material for her novel Sylvia’s Lovers (1863). Other nineteenth-century authors who visited Whitby include Alfred Tennyson in 1852, Lewis Carrol in 1854, Charles Dickens in 1861 and his friend Wilkie Collins, who wrote the novel No Name (1862) while staying in the town. The Punch cartoonists John Leech and George du Maurier were visitors respectively in the 1860s and 1880s and incorporated Whitby scenes into their published work.

The West Cliff Estate passed to the self-made industrialist Sir George Elliot, Bt (1814-1893), who projected the Royal Crescent (John Dobson 1876-9) and the West Cliff Saloon and Promenade (1880, now the Spa Theatre).

One look at the architecture of the Royal Crescent and the gothic Church Square behind it (St Hilda’s parish church itself dates from 1884-6) tells the tale of over ambition and half-completion. There were simply not sufficient Mrs Gaskells to fill the place.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

St Hilda’s abbey

Leave a Reply
Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

Whitby Abbey, North Yorkshire

The instantly recognisable ruin of Whitby Abbey on the cliff-top above the harbour is freighted with fourteen centuries of history.

Founded in AD 657 by a Northumbrian princess who became St Hilda, it was the location for the Synod of Whitby (AD 664), which established that the English church would follow Roman rather than Celtic custom.

Nevertheless, St Hilda’s Saxon abbey was designed in the Celtic manner, for parallel communities of monks and nuns, living in single cells but worshipping together.  Of the monks in her time five became bishops; two of them, like her, became saints – St John of Beverley and St Wilfrid of York.  A lay member of her community was Caedmon, traditionally regarded as the earliest English poet.

The first abbey was destroyed by the Danish invaders in AD 867 and refounded in Norman times by one of the knights who fought at Hastings, Reinfrid, who settled here as a monk and developed a Benedictine community in the 1070s.

The existing ruins represent a massive rebuilding, starting in the 1220s, continuing after a fundraising effort in 1334, followed by a distinctive break when a change from lancet windows to Decorated tracery indicates an interruption to the rebuilding programme of perhaps a hundred years between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  The final installation of the now-vanished Perpendicular west window was only completed in the fifteenth century.

Shortly after the Dissolution, in March 1540 the abbey precinct passed to Sir Richard Cholmley of Kingthorpe, near Pickering, “the great blacke knight of the North”, whose son, Francis, adapted the abbot’s lodging to make a residence. His descendant, Sir Hugh Cholmley (1632-89) aggrandised his residence Abbey House with an imposing classical Banqueting Hall wing (1672-82), the shell of which houses a modern visitor centre.

The Abbey ruins served as a waymark for mariners, but what now remains is only a vestige. Much of the church, including the tower, still stood in 1711, but the south transept collapsed in 1736, the south wall of the nave in 1762, the nave arcade in 1793, the west window the year after, the central tower on June 25th 1830 and part of the presbytery in 1839.

What was left of the west front was bombarded by the German battle cruisers Von der Tann and Derfflinger on December 16th 1914, and later reinstated, with a section of the nave arcade reassembled incongruously by the north boundary wall, after the Ministry of Works took over the site in 1920.

There are easier ways of visiting the Abbey and the nearby church of St Mary than by walking up the 199 steps from the town. There’s a discreetly hidden car-park, and a tourist bus running a half-hour service during the summer: http://www.coastalandcountry.co.uk/openTopCoach.html.

Opening times for the Abbey are at http://www.english-heritage.org.uk/visit/places/whitby-abbey.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Movies return to the Abbeydale

Leave a Reply

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

I’ve been providing historical back-up to an events organisation, Hand Of, who are devising an film weekend to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the last picture show at the Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield.

Picture House Revival: a Festival of Film takes place on Saturday July 18th and Sunday July 19th 2015, combining films, food, popcorn, ice cream, real ale and a sarsaparilla bar, a recreation of  a once much-loved temperance alternative to Sheffield’s pubs: http://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/picture-house-revival-a-festival-of-film-tickets-17122290231.

In fact, the event doesn’t take place on the actually anniversary (which would be July 5th) and it doesn’t reproduce the last picture show (Charles Bronson in Breakout, supported by Lords of Flatbush).

Instead, the programme includes the very first film ever shown at the Abbeydale, on December 20th 1920, a costume romance called The Call of the Road, billed as “a picture that will make history”, alongside Laurel & Hardy and more recent Yorkshire favourites, Brassed Off (Mark Harmon 1996) and Four Lions (Chris Morris 2010).

It’s a very exciting development to bring back movies to one of the few surviving Sheffield suburban cinemas: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EVD7_x3cb1w.

I hope it’ll be the first of many film revivals in the Abbeydale.