Richard Gray’s new book is a comprehensive history of British cinema architecture. It is based not just on the high points but also on knowledge gained working for the Cinema Theatre Association, architectural champion of the silver screen. It is a story of entrepreneurs as well as architects.
Gray’s achievement is to have documented and illustrated all the best of the cinemas in provincial cities (shades of Brief Encounter) and above all the cinema palaces of the London suburbs. The Dalston Picture Theatre in north-east London (opened 1920) was the first to be described as a super cinema. There were electric lamps simulating flaming torchères and the most expensive front balcony seats were upholstered in gold silk. It came with an orchestra pit for 26 musicians.
With 2,200 seats, the Regent in Brighton (1921) brought the opulent style of the American movie palace to Britain. It was designed by Robert Atkinson, architect of the Jazz Modern entrance hall of the Daily Express in Fleet Street.
The Empire Leicester Square opened 1928 on the site of a Victorian music hall. The design was entrusted to Thomas Lamb, a Scot who designed many cinemas for Loew, MGM’s parent company in the States. Lamb gave it a mirror-lined double-height foyer filled with crystal chandeliers, candelabras and rich drapery. In 1962 the interior was gutted because 3,226 seats could no longer be filled.
The Troxy in Stepney, East London, opened in 1935, its name an amalgam of Trocadero and Roxy. Inside was full-on French Art Deco with a golden onyx stair, frozen fountains, zigzags and looped festoons. The auditorium survives as an entertainment venue largely as a result of 25 years of use as a rehearsal studio for the Royal Opera House.
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The Lido in Golders Green (1928) was Britain’s first “atmospheric” — the name given to cinemas where the whole auditorium was designed as a stage set. The interior, by Guy Lipscombe, portrayed a scene of a north Italian lake with cypresses and belfries. The Regal Marble Arch (also 1928) had a pergola ceiling hung with imitation vines and grapes.
The most impressive atmospherics were the Astorias in Brixton and Finsbury Park, both furnished with a lavish budget. The Brixton auditorium was an Italian piazza with faux cypresses against an illuminated Fiesole hillside while Finsbury was Hispano-Mooresque fantasy of cupolas, turrets and loggias. Upton Park, East London, had the best Egyptian façade with lotus leaf capitals to the columns and a winged scarab above. The Palace in Southall (1929) was a Chinese temple with dragons on the roof.
Sidney Bernstein conceived his circuit of luxury cinemas, the Granadas, after a trip to the United States. Bernstein used the Russian stage director and designer Theodore Komisarjevsky, whose masterpiece was Tooting, completed in 1931 and a high point of extravagant fantasy, with a Strawberry Hill foyer and auditorium which is a heady mix of the House of Lords and Rheims cathedral. Six Granadas are now listed.
An imaginative group of cinemas was built by Joseph Mears, alderman of Richmond on Thames, who employed the architect Julian Rudolph Leathart. Mears’s finest was The Sheen in East Sheen, streamlined Art Deco with a crescendo of vertical ribs and jade-green faience sculptural reliefs.
In the 1930s exoticism and romance steady gave way to the sleak lines of Modernism. The crucial commission for London’s New Victoria 1930 was won by the architect Ernest Wamsley Lewis who showed how 2,860 seats could be provided on an expensive but awkward site. Lewis promised his client a mermaid’s palace. The result was an inspired blend of stalactites and fan vaulting fired by the strength and colouring of German Expressionism.
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Cinema Modernism reached maturity with the rise of the Odeon. The circuit was founded by Oscar Deutsch, son of a Birmingham scrap metal dealer. Deutsch halved building costs by replacing balconies with continuously stepped seats. His trademark towers came with fins (good for night illumination). In the nine years up to the Second World war, Deutsch opened 142 Odeons. Most striking of all was the Odeon Leicester Square (1937) with a façade of black polished granite. The foyer was panelled empire wood veneers while the auditorium was ribbed to create an effect like pleated silk. Alas, says Gray, all was replaced in 1967 by “unrelieved blandness”. 1 For years the outlook for historic cinemas seemed dire with falling audiences, competition from multiplexes, home cinema and DVDs, with bingo, once the saviour of the best auditoriums, on the decline too. At last the tide of destruction is turning. The latest unexpected “save” is the Odeon in St Helier, Jersey, which opened in 1951. Meanwhile, if you’re ever in Tooting, be sure to sign up for bingo, as I once did, for London’s most glorious architectural surprise.
Cinemas in Britain: A History of Cinema Architecture by Richard Gray (Lund Humphries, £45)