One thing i have noticed over the years is that epic cinema explores seem to come in two flavours. The standard being your Streatham Hill, Grays State, Hulme Hippodrome examples of amazing untouched originality and then the other being your Preston, Bournemouth, Aylesbury and of course Bradford Odeon (do i see a theme here) examples of once great, yet now completely bastardised buildings that are such the complete opposite of that description. This place is yet another Odeon that definitely fits in that second category and quite frankly is well up there with the best of them!
I set out on a trip down south with more cinema leads than I have had in one area since 2009! 6 stops in Kent alone plus many more on the way down there and back, just like the good old days! This one was a late addition. What with all the bingo halls going recently it had been a while since i had researched actual cinema closures and I think as this was one of the 'closed for covid never to re-open' type affairs it has slipped me by until a quick google the day before. I wasn't really expecting to get very far. A cursory glance on street view showed a well overlooked and quite secure looking building and arriving there mid morning i was prepared to just have a quick walk around before moving on. Luckily the local crack heads seemed to have left just the very start of an opportunity open. It wasn't clear if this would work or if it would just leave me high and dry looking like I was up to no good in front of the whole town but luckily after picking my moment well things started to work out. The complete opposite of a walk in but it was a sniff of what the place had in store for me. I initially found myself in the industrial areas of the building, boiler house, ventilation and the like. Most of which seemed to have been pretty much disused for decades with only the boilers looking like that had had any recent attention. Screwed doors presented the usual obstacles but the place was such a rabbit warren of narrow corridors, hatches, tunnels and ventilation ducts i felt sure there must be a way passed the doors somehow. After a lot of ducking and diving finding quite an array of cool behind the scenes cinema nerd stuff like the original organ pit and lifter mechanism along the way i eventually popped out behind the familiar plasterwork outline of the main ventilation louvres. Peering through I knew id struck gold and also was the point I realised my tripod was still in the car and i was going to need way longer then the 30mins parking i had available so i left back out in to the baking 30 degree summer day to fix both those problems and get some much needed refreshment.
After repeating the slightly iffy entrance fore a second time I managed to crawl through said louvres and was amazed to see just how intact the original interior of the cinema was. Like many old Odeons of this era, what you actually see as a punter is nothing more then a façade. A cinema built within a cinema if you like. Sometimes this can be horribly destructive to the original fabric of the building but here was quite the opposite. Wherever you looked in the whole building there was remnants poking through and it seemed like if you removed all the plasterboard partitions there would be almost a whole intact 30s theatre hiding behind..
After some more climbing, crawling and using some tricks of the trade picked up over the last 96 odd examples i found myself inside the modern cinema itself. The concern became more about whether the many PIRs would bring any attention but luckily after setting off multiples it appeared not! Upon closure the cinema had two screens. One in the stalls and one in the circle. I found myself downstairs in the stalls screen and made my way back up to the foyer checking out its modern projection room as I went. Surprisingly this wasn't so bad with lots left and even a nice old spot lamp lurking in one corner. Quite why im not sure, its far too out of date to have actually been used in there! The lobby area was pure modern Odeon but again everywhere you looked the original was still poking through behind the dislodged ceiling tiles.
I headed upstairs to the circle and other screen but was surprised to again be thwarted by many boarded up doors. Having not done much research prior I was a little confused why this was but after a little google it became clear one of the main reasons this cinema did not re-open was the imminent danger of collapse from its roof! It appeared the whole of the circle has simply been boarded up for safety reasons not even leaving a official access hatch. Thankfully there was plenty more still to see tho. I started tackling the 'front of house' area, this was clearly not open to the public in its final days, containing mostly staff rooms and offices and was also quite confusing in its layout with some odd voids and a distinct lack of circle bar area (that nearly every cinema has). Again after some post research ive realised what has gone on here. The cinema was bombed during ww2 and the frontage was damaged. It was never really rebuild properly, simply patched up and made water tight and that has lead to a very obvious once you actually take the time to look at it 'half frontage'
This just left the original projection rooms to hunt out. Luckily access here was open and the rooms themselves quite well stocked with several generations of projection equipment and the like. I even managed a shot of the inaccessible screen before slowly making my way back out the entrance gauntlet in reverse.
Sadly after this one the trip started to go a bit to pear shaped (for non exploring reasons) but really enjoyed my half a day round Kent checking out some of its many epics. Hopefully theres a few more out there this good to come.
Undecided if its an 8 or an 8.5 on Speeds cinema scale.
I set out on a trip down south with more cinema leads than I have had in one area since 2009! 6 stops in Kent alone plus many more on the way down there and back, just like the good old days! This one was a late addition. What with all the bingo halls going recently it had been a while since i had researched actual cinema closures and I think as this was one of the 'closed for covid never to re-open' type affairs it has slipped me by until a quick google the day before. I wasn't really expecting to get very far. A cursory glance on street view showed a well overlooked and quite secure looking building and arriving there mid morning i was prepared to just have a quick walk around before moving on. Luckily the local crack heads seemed to have left just the very start of an opportunity open. It wasn't clear if this would work or if it would just leave me high and dry looking like I was up to no good in front of the whole town but luckily after picking my moment well things started to work out. The complete opposite of a walk in but it was a sniff of what the place had in store for me. I initially found myself in the industrial areas of the building, boiler house, ventilation and the like. Most of which seemed to have been pretty much disused for decades with only the boilers looking like that had had any recent attention. Screwed doors presented the usual obstacles but the place was such a rabbit warren of narrow corridors, hatches, tunnels and ventilation ducts i felt sure there must be a way passed the doors somehow. After a lot of ducking and diving finding quite an array of cool behind the scenes cinema nerd stuff like the original organ pit and lifter mechanism along the way i eventually popped out behind the familiar plasterwork outline of the main ventilation louvres. Peering through I knew id struck gold and also was the point I realised my tripod was still in the car and i was going to need way longer then the 30mins parking i had available so i left back out in to the baking 30 degree summer day to fix both those problems and get some much needed refreshment.
After repeating the slightly iffy entrance fore a second time I managed to crawl through said louvres and was amazed to see just how intact the original interior of the cinema was. Like many old Odeons of this era, what you actually see as a punter is nothing more then a façade. A cinema built within a cinema if you like. Sometimes this can be horribly destructive to the original fabric of the building but here was quite the opposite. Wherever you looked in the whole building there was remnants poking through and it seemed like if you removed all the plasterboard partitions there would be almost a whole intact 30s theatre hiding behind..
After some more climbing, crawling and using some tricks of the trade picked up over the last 96 odd examples i found myself inside the modern cinema itself. The concern became more about whether the many PIRs would bring any attention but luckily after setting off multiples it appeared not! Upon closure the cinema had two screens. One in the stalls and one in the circle. I found myself downstairs in the stalls screen and made my way back up to the foyer checking out its modern projection room as I went. Surprisingly this wasn't so bad with lots left and even a nice old spot lamp lurking in one corner. Quite why im not sure, its far too out of date to have actually been used in there! The lobby area was pure modern Odeon but again everywhere you looked the original was still poking through behind the dislodged ceiling tiles.
I headed upstairs to the circle and other screen but was surprised to again be thwarted by many boarded up doors. Having not done much research prior I was a little confused why this was but after a little google it became clear one of the main reasons this cinema did not re-open was the imminent danger of collapse from its roof! It appeared the whole of the circle has simply been boarded up for safety reasons not even leaving a official access hatch. Thankfully there was plenty more still to see tho. I started tackling the 'front of house' area, this was clearly not open to the public in its final days, containing mostly staff rooms and offices and was also quite confusing in its layout with some odd voids and a distinct lack of circle bar area (that nearly every cinema has). Again after some post research ive realised what has gone on here. The cinema was bombed during ww2 and the frontage was damaged. It was never really rebuild properly, simply patched up and made water tight and that has lead to a very obvious once you actually take the time to look at it 'half frontage'
This just left the original projection rooms to hunt out. Luckily access here was open and the rooms themselves quite well stocked with several generations of projection equipment and the like. I even managed a shot of the inaccessible screen before slowly making my way back out the entrance gauntlet in reverse.
Sadly after this one the trip started to go a bit to pear shaped (for non exploring reasons) but really enjoyed my half a day round Kent checking out some of its many epics. Hopefully theres a few more out there this good to come.
Undecided if its an 8 or an 8.5 on Speeds cinema scale.
