When I visited Nottingham Playhouse recently to see my friend Andrea in a superlative production of Aaron Sorkin’s play based on Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird [To Kill A Mockingbird] I felt an immediate sense of nostalgia when I entered the auditorium.
When the Playhouse opened in 1963 I was in the middle of my grammar-school education and by the time we reached the sixth form the following year our English teachers had formed a rota to take us by coach once a month on a Friday evening to see whatever was on in the Playhouse’s opening seasons which were directed principally by John Neville (1925-2011).
Neville shared his role of artistic director at first with Frank Dunlop (b1927), who went on to found the Young Vic in 1969, and the polymathic Peter Ustinov (1921-2004). Between them they brought to Nottingham a broad range of classic drama and a scintillating troupe of talented actors.
Therefore, in our teens, we were privileged to see – live on stage – not only John Neville’s Richard II, Oedipus and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, but the twenty-something Judi Dench as Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Country Wife, which had us rolling about in our front-row seats, even if some of us didn’t at first twig the pun in the title.
These opportunities were unrepeatable: Neville resigned in 1969 because the theatre’s grant was repeatedly frozen; nowadays theatre seat-prices are elevated beyond most school budgets, especially when big-name performers are cast. Indeed, Nottingham Playhouse runs a laudable 50:50 Appeal, which enables audiences to donate the cost of tickets for local people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live theatre: 50:50 Appeal – Nottingham Playhouse.
I’m pleased to see that Peter Moro’s theatre, with the circular drum of the auditorium prominent above the rectilinear outer shell, has been respectfully restored: Moro had been involved in the Royal Festival Hall project, and for Nottingham created a conventional proscenium theatre that encloses its audience so they share the same space as the actors.
And on the night I was there the To Kill a Mockingbird tour filled every seat in the house as it storms around the country on its way to a West End run in August 2026: TOUR — To Kill A Mockingbird.
My latest book, The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema, is now on sale. It’s a long story, but a short book, telling the history of a much-loved building, the people who worked there and the thousands whose lives were brightened by it from 1920 onwards.
The Abbeydale Picture House has always been exceptional among local cinemas. Its architect, Pascal J Stienlet, designed the auditorium and stage as a theatre, so the balcony embraces the proscenium and the stage has a fly-tower and a suite of dressing rooms which I’ve come to suspect were never completed.
The building sits on the edge of a steep cliff overlooking the River Sheaf, so the space under the stage was fitted out as a billiard saloon, and the ballroom beneath the auditorium had a sprung floor and a disconcerting sloping ceiling to match the rake of the seating above.
Its original proprietors struggled in the face of post-war inflation and quickly handed the place over to a more experienced team who were involved in two other cinemas south of the city centre.
It took until the 1930s for the shareholders to receive a modest dividend, but from then till the late 1950s the Abbeydale brought in crowds to watch films, dance and play billiards. The Abbeydale offered warmth, comfort and style. A whole generation of local people met their life-partner under its roof.
As times changed and suburban cinemas went out of favour, it was the third last suburban cinema in Sheffield to close, in 1975.
It was quickly adapted as an office-equipment showroom, but since then attempts to find it a practical purpose have repeatedly failed, until True North Brew Co acquired it at the beginning of 2025 and made firm plans to restore and refurbish it as a multipurpose entertainment centre – which was exactly its function in the 1920s: Abbeydale Ballroom | Sheffield’s new social space | pool hall.
I’ve been involved in the Abbeydale’s heritage since the 1980s, and had the good fortune to build my knowledge on Dr Clifford Shaw’s extensive research, and on oral-history interviews carried out by a Sheffield University postgraduate student, Holly Dann, both of whom talked to people who remembered the Abbeydale since before the Second World War.
It’s arguably the only surviving first-generation cinema in Sheffield that’s physically intact, architecturally interesting and has an abundance of stories about the people for whom it was and is a landmark in their lives.
Of the fifty-two cinemas that were operating within the then city boundary in the first month of the Second World War, the Abbeydale is the only one that has so many tales to tell and has the potential to bring enjoyment to future generations of Sheffield people.
A participant on a recent Heritage Open Days tour remarked, “I’ve passed this place hundreds of times and never realised how beautiful it is.”
The Abbeydale Picture House: Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema has 56 A5 pages in full colour.
To purchase, please click here, or send a cheque for £10.00 per copy payable to Mike Higginbottom at 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ. Contact: 0114-242-0951 or 07946-650672 or mike@mikehigginbottominterestingtimes.co.uk
Researching the history and architecture of public houses is a minefield. Documentation is widely scattered, images are variable in quality and often undated, and personal memories are often vague because they’re born of habit.
The Crown & Kettle on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Road north of Manchester’s city centre has a coherent story that’s repeatedly told but some of the details are open to debate.
The name is unusual, but not as strange as the earlier name, the “Iron Dish & Cob of Coal”. Neither has been satisfactorily explained.
The earliest reference to a building on the site is dated 1734 and indicates it was used as a courthouse, and the connection with justice leads to unlikely tales of a secret tunnel to Strangeways Prison (built 1866-68) and “hanging pits” beneath the gents’ lavatory.
The eighteenth-century building isn’t the present-day two-storey pub. Neil Richardson’s The Old Pubs of Ancoats (2016) cites a directory of 1800 and includes an 1820 sketch of a three-storey, eighteenth-century building with a distinctive sign of a crown and a kettle.
The Manchester Evening News (August 26th 1976) mentions that the Crown & Kettle held a drinks licence by 1799. There are repeated newspaper advertisements for auctions on the premises from 1800 onwards.
Whatever its origins the current grand building with a high-ceilinged ground floor makes an excellent hostelry and has been a landmark for something like the better part of two centuries. Its interior is memorable for its elaborate Gothic plaster ceiling and the huge pendants which originally carried gasolier lighting fixtures.
Until the 1990s the snug had mahogany panelling which allegedly came from the R101 airship. This seems unlikely because the R101 was destroyed when it crashed and burst into flames near Beauvais, northern France, in October 1930 killing 48 passengers and crew. It’s possible that the panelling actually came from the R100, which was grounded and scrapped after the R101 tragedy.
In the mid-twentieth century the Crown & Kettle was a popular watering hole for journalists and printers from the Daily Express building next door. One history-forum contributor blamed the pub for the paper’s “speeling mistakes”. There’s a story that the Express photographer Jack Kay used to visit with his pet duck, which was teetotal and drank water from an ashtray.
The Crown & Kettle was listed Grade II in 1974. It was closed after an altercation on February 3rd 1990 between supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City that was variously described as a “fight”, a “riot” and “like the Wild West”, and according to the Manchester Evening News caused £30,000-worth of damage. Every member of staff on duty was injured.
A subsequent arson attack ruined the mahogany panelling in the snug.
It remained closed until 2005 when, with assistance from English Heritage, the ceiling was partly restored, leaving the remainder “as found”. After a change of ownership and a further refurbishment in 2000-2001 some of the interior walls were stripped back to the brickwork.
These vicissitudes have enhanced the atmosphere and appeal of the place. It was awarded the Greater Manchester CAMRA regional Pub of the Year 2015 and the Central Manchester Pub of the Year 2019.
The Crown & Kettle is a star in Manchester’s city-centre constellation of fine pubs. Its history is lengthy and robust, and loses nothing in the telling.
Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (2025)Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (1977)
The Premier Electric Theatre in Somercotes, Derbyshire, hasn’t screened a movie since Bonfire Night 1960.
It was built for the local wine-merchant, George Beastall, and opened on New Year’s Day 1912. At first it seated only three hundred, with a modest entrance between two shops, but was quickly enlarged to seat more than a thousand.
When sound was installed in 1930 an imposing brick façade replaced the shops and the seating capacity was increased to 1,180.
George Beastall sold the cinema in the mid-1940s and it changed hands repeatedly until it was bought by Ollerton Pictures Ltd which subsequently acquired the Empire Theatre opposite the Premier, as well as other small picture houses in the nearby villages of Pinxton, Jacksdale and South Normanton.
In contrast to these four modest cinemas, the Premier was equipped to show Cinemascope films in 1954, which attracted an audience from a wide area.
Its fortunes fell after the evening show on November 5th 1960 when a fire broke out. Earlier, teenagers had been seen outside throwing lit fireworks through the emergency exits. The manager, Mr Percy Dennis, told the Nottingham Evening Post (November 7th 1960), “Perhaps I’d better not say what I really think of teenagers.”
Ollerton Pictures clearly intended to reinstate the damage at a cost of £10,000. Their spokesman told the Nottingham Evening Post (Monday February 20th 1961), “Pull it down? Not at all. We are so sure that there is a demand in this area that we are turning it into a virtually new cinema.”
However, a year later the Birmingham Post (February 12th 1962) reported, under a headline “NEW CINEMA SEATS NOT WORTH WHILE”, that refurbishment was delayed because of an apparent shortage of second-hand seats. There must have been many cinema closures at the time releasing redundant seating but the Premier spokesman declared, “There was such a lot of seat-slashing by teenagers before the cinema closed that it would not be worthwhile to put in new seats.”
The building stayed dark until Walker’s Bingo Clubs made it comfortable for their purposes and opened it in 1974. An image on the Somercotes Local History Society website shows how it looked during “eyes down”. Walker’s Bingo eventually closed in 2013.
By 2018 the empty building had been converted to a cannabis farm, and in 2020 architects Windsor Patania submitted plans to demolish the auditorium and construct a three-storey block of twenty apartments, while restoring the 1930 foyer block.
This would have involved removing the fine “PREMIER ELECTRIC THEATRE” plasterwork from the blank wall facing Victoria Street.
Images on the ‘Reawaken the Premier Electric Theatre’ Facebook page indicate the dire state of the interior, suggesting that Councillor Jason Parker’s estimate of £4 million to put the place in order won’t leave much small change.
Nevertheless, there are cinema buildings in Britain that have been restored by the commitment of volunteers backed by experts who know what they’re doing. The tiny Harwich Electric Palace became a lair for feral cats before reopening for film in 1981. The vast New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, rescued after a thousand supporters joined hands in a “Hug the Odeon” demonstration, is about to reopen as a live music venue, and the Stockport Plaza has been pulling in the crowds since it reopened in 2000.
Such schemes don’t always work out. The Bronte Cinema in Haworth is in the same state as it was when I found it in 2016, despite occasional local expressions of interest. And, of course, there have been disasters like the Derby Hippodrome Theatre.
But I’d never underestimate the potential of volunteers with energy and flair – and expert backing – to bring dilapidated buildings back into use.
Former Northwick Cinema, WorcesterFormer Northwick Cinema, Worcester
The Northwick Cinema is a fluke. It’s strange to find a superb Art Deco cinema in a quiet suburb of a cathedral city, designed by an independent architect who specialised in cinemas in random places such as Sheerness, Kettering and Walton-on-Thames, containing the only surviving interior-design work of an exceptional artist who worked mainly in the North-East.
The proprietors of Scala (Worcester) Ltd had operated a city-centre picture-house of that name since 1922, and it’s unclear why this small local company expanded in the late Thirties by building a brand-new 1,109-seat auditorium out of the city centre.
The interior is by John Alexander (1888-1974), an artist of considerable talent whose watercolour perspectives are in the RIBA Drawings Collection and online at ‘ John Alexander (1888-1974)’ images and/or videos results. He not only designed but manufactured the plaster figures and motifs that distinguished his designs.
His innovative work, mainly located in Scotland and the north-east, has been so neglected that the Northwick contains his only design still surviving intact and in situ. For this reason, the Northwick was listed Grade II in 1985, and its Art Deco design is recognised as nationally important.
The auditorium is dominated by a fibrous plaster composition of mythical human figures, drawing the eye dramatically towards the proscenium. By the use of smooth curves, heightened perspective and strong geometric shapes, lit indirectly, the auditorium conveys a sense of excitement that heralds the entertainment it was intended to frame.
Unlike the Odeon house-architects’ use of Art Deco to create a streamlined interior that was smooth and literally dust-resistant, Alexander reinterpreted the baroque magnificence of the Victorian theatre in the larger-than-life scale of modernist architecture. Alexander’s work at the Northwick cost £1,138.
The cinema opened on November 28th 1938 and closed on October 10th 1966, reopening as a bingo club at the end of that month. Mecca, the unintentional saviour of so many such buildings, maintained it well and redecorated it abominably, until falling attendances led to closure in 1982.
There was much anxiety and some controversy about the building in the years it stood empty.
Ultimately a local property developer and entertainment impresario, Ian Perks, took over the building and engaged Martin and Nicolette Baines to refurbish Alexander’s interior, restoring the colour-scheme from his original water-colours and wherever possible utilising original fittings, lighting and carpet-fragments in the renewal.
The Northwick reopened as a theatre and concert venue on June 5th 1991, and hosted shows by – among others – the Drifters, Gene Pitney, Nigel Kennedy, Freddie Starr, the Searchers and Bernard Manning, but closed in 1996. The extent of its decline is portrayed in a 2024 article in the Worcester News: Worcester: The Northwick as a cinema, theatre and business | Worcester News.
The local council rejected a proposal to demolish in favour of an apartment complex in 2003, and the following year David and Helen Gray bought it to use as an antiques showroom, sympathetically preserving its external appearance including the “NORTHWICK” logo on the vertical fin above the entrance and featuring John Alexander’s interior design.
The Northwick opened in 2007 as Grays of Worcester, a company which has treated it well, making the most of its visual appeal to market their stock: HISTORY – Grays Of Worcester.
The auditorium rakes have been adapted to maximise horizontal display space, but circulation between levels is achieved using the original stairways. David Gray made a point of retaining the front-row seats in the circle so that it’s possible to appreciate the space as would a member of the cinema audience. The operating box at the top of the building serves as a workroom. The listed space is intact, and appears to be fully reversible.
The Northwick is currently up for sale, as Grays plan to downsize to smaller premises.
I hope it goes to an owner as enlightened and imaginative as David and Helen Gray.
He breathed new life into the resort’s declining tourist economy when he founded the Flamingo night club in 1979 before taking over the vast derelict Odeon Cinema and transforming it into Funny Girls in 2002: Funny Girls | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.
Funny Girls was and is inclusive, offering high-quality dance-entertainment introduced by a sharp-tongued compère, alongside the option of a pre-performance dinner, to gay and straight patrons.
Staid Lancashire businessmen at one time found it hard to believe that the glamorous girls on stage and the waitresses who served dinner were in fact men.
Straight Sheffield footballers of my acquaintance, and their girlfriends, made repeat visits because they thought the show was “a reyt laff”.
It’s a measure both of Basil’s achievement and the transformation of British culture since the 1990s that he has collected tributes ranging from a private box at the Grand Theatre to an MBE for services to business and to the LGBTQIA+ community.
Long may the old Odeon continue to offer holidaymakers what Dr Samuel Johnson called “the publick stock of harmless pleasure [and] the gaiety of nations”: Our Story | Funny Girls.
Birley Spa, Hackenthorpe, Sheffield: Large Plunging Bath (2008)
Birley Spa is a surprise,– a nineteenth-century bathing-resort hidden in the middle of the post-war Hackenthorpe housing-estate on the outskirts of Sheffield.
Local tradition maintains that the spa is ancient, but its documented history only dates from 1734 and its practical development followed a 1788 survey which proposed the building of a Bath Hotel, laying out paths and building two bridges across the stream.
In 1843 the Lord of the Manor, Charles, 2nd Earl Manvers, financed the development of the present building, incorporating a range of seven plunge- and shower-baths built into the hillside on the lower level, and on the upper floor a “lodging-house” with facilities to drink the waters as well as “tea, coffee and other refreshments”, run by a resident manager.
There were two distinct water-sources – an iron-bearing chalybeate spring for drinking, and the Large Plunging Bath was filled with “water as pure as chrystal [sic]”.
Birley Spa offered annual subscriptions from 15 shillings, and single baths ranged in price from the “Best Marble Hot Bath” at 2s 6d, to a simple cold plunge in the large bath at sixpence. Subscribers to the Bath Charity were entitled to recommend “Poor Persons”, on a sliding scale, to make free use of the Spa.
A special omnibus-service ran from the Commercial Inn in the centre of Sheffield, twice daily except on Sundays.
The hotel closed in 1878 and its accommodation was converted first into residences. The hot baths and showers fell out of use by 1895 and have now disappeared, but the large sandstone oval plunging bath, 25 feet by 18 feet and 5 feet deep, survives.
The grounds of the Spa were developed between the World Wars as a privately-operated children’s playground including a boating-lake and paddling pool, wishing well, swing-boats and a sandpit. The now-demolished balcony of the Spa House was used as a bandstand.
All this activity ceased on the outbreak of war in 1939, and in the 1950s the site came into the possession of Sheffield City Housing Department, which in 1960 proposed to demolish the Spa buildings.
The City Architect, Lewis Womersley, presented an alternative scheme to retain the buildings as a community hall, and this was partially completed in 1966.
Birley Spa was listed Grade II in 1973.
Although some essential maintenance was carried out in 1986, the site suffered increasingly from neglect and vandalism until in 1988 the City’s Countryside Management Unit began a programme of conservation, interpretation and restoration, involving local schools, community groups and the frogmen from South Yorkshire Police.
The initial aim was to recreate the Spa as a local amenity, as it had been at two distinct periods in its history, initially by encouraging its use as a pleasure-ground, and later by restoring the bath-house to use and perhaps marketing the mineral water.
In the event, the restored bath-house has been displayed but not used, and it has been cared for by volunteers involved in a succession of groups which became the Birley Spa Preservation Trust in 2018.
My friend John’s sixtieth birthday celebration was stylish and memorable – dinner in the Midland Hotel, Morecambe, with the option of staying for the weekend in Art Deco splendour.
For me, the highlight was when we took his mother, Marjorie, for a morning cup of coffee at Brucciani’s on the seafront.
This celebrated and much-loved Italian milk bar is part of a family concern dating back to 1893 when Luigi Brucciani, aged thirteen, arrived with his family from Tuscany and settled in Barrow-in-Furness, across the bay from Morecambe.
Luigi’s son, Peter, opened the first of two Morecambe milk bars in 1932, followed by the current promenade location, almost next door to the Winter Gardens, the week before the start of World War II in 1939.
As war turned away the holidaymakers and killed the ice-cream trade, Brucciani’s prospered providing Italian coffee to military personnel. After the war, when the holiday crowds and the ice cream returned, so did artistes at the Winter Gardens, including locally-born Thora Hird and Eric Morecambe (né Bartholomew), and Brucciuani’s grew from a milk bar to a café.
In July 2022, the then Prince Charles, as well as unveiling a plaque to celebrate the 125th anniversary of the Winter Gardens, popped in to sample Brucciani’s ice cream. He was served vanilla.
Brucciani’s sells only their own ice-cream to an Italian recipe in more than a dozen flavours. The décor has hardly changed, and is lovingly illustrated at Brucciani’s – Morecambe – Modern Mooch.
When John and I took his mother for coffee at Brucciani’s in Morecambe on a Saturday morning in January 2015, she said that she could remember the place when it first opened in September 1939.
Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live (2025)
Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford, now Bradford Live: restaurant decorative detail (2025)
I was privileged recently to join a Cinema Theatre Association visit to Bradford Live, the newly-restored New Victoria Cinema (1930), which survived brutal alterations, persistent neglect and threats of demolition until it was rescued and impressively restored as a “world-class” concert venue.
It was, and is, a magnificent building. It opened on September 22nd 1930 with a spectacular ceremony that included the film Rookery Nook and much else. Its size ensured its physical and commercial survival through vicissitudes that have blown away many of its contemporaries.
It was designed by a Bradford architect, William Illingworth (1875-1955), and at its opening it was claimed to be the third largest cinema in England and the largest outside London.
Two of its London rivals of greater size, the Davis Theatre, Croydon (opened December 18th 1928; 3,925 seats) and the Trocadero, Elephant & Castle (opened December 22nd 1930; 3,500 seats) have both gone.
Comparisons, as the schoolboy said, are odorous. There were other 1930s cinemas with capacity for around four thousand patrons, some of which survive such as the Granada Cinema, Tooting (opened September 7th 1931; slightly less than 4,000 seats; currently a bingo club) and the Gaumont State Theatre, Kilburn (opened December 20th 1937; 4,004 seats; now a church).
William Illingworth provided Bradford with a vast 3,318-seat auditorium with a Wurlitzer organ, facing a stage 70ft wide × 45ft deep, alongside a ballroom, a 200-cover restaurant and a tea-room café. The auditorium decoration was dignified Italian Renaissance, while the comfortable, stylish front-of-house spaces included Art Deco features and warm, adventurous colour schemes.
Built for Provincial & Cinematograph Theatres, it was operated successively by the Gaumont and Odeon chains and prospered until the 1960s. In particular, its stage and audience capacity meant that every significant rock and pop performer, excepting only Elvis Presley, appeared in Bradford, from Bill Haley and the Comets and Buddy Holly to the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.
Film and live performances in the auditorium ceased in 1968 – Rio Conchos and Tom Jones were the last shows.
The conversion to twin screens and bingo in 1968 was ferocious. The structure was sufficiently robust and there was so much space that the two cinemas were built on the circle and gallery, and the stalls became a huge bingo club. Most of Illingworth’s plaster decoration was ripped out, though a segment of the balcony plasterwork remained hidden in a void for decades. The ballroom – redundant for twenty years – became a third screen in 1988. Schemes to subdivide the building further in 1991 and 1994 came to nothing.
In July 2000 Odeon opened a multiplex at Thornbury, where 3,300 people (almost the original capacity of the New Victoria) could choose from sixteen different movies at any particular time of day. The game was up for the Odeon cinemas in Bradford and Leeds.
As the Odeon Bradford gradually deteriorated, local people got together to oppose its destruction. An exceptional campaigner, Norman Littlewood, with his wife Julie, founded the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group (BORG) in 2003. Its most spectacular demonstration was the occasion in 2007 when a thousand people joined hands and hugged the Odeon.
Schemes to demolish and redevelop came and went until, partly through the efforts of urban explorers, it became apparent that significant amounts of original decorative features survived behind the 1968 alterations.
The building passed through the hands of a succession of entities until Bradford Live bought it from the city council for £1, and spent rather more than that – £50.5 million – on its transformation.
It’s a palimpsest – a document that’s been repeatedly erased and rewritten. Under the aegis of the Aedas Arts Team, William Illingworth’s surviving work has been restored and replicated, particularly in the ballroom and restaurant. Elsewhere the bare structure of two million bricks and one hundred tons of steel indicates the magnificence of the architect’s engineering: https://cdn.rt.emap.com/wp-content/uploads/sites/4/2018/12/28135511/20181203_aat_designandaccessstatementpart1.pdf.
It will be performance, particularly music, that makes this place pay. The days when three thousand people will queue up to see the same movie at the same time are gone.
The crowded streets that hemmed in the New Victoria in 1930 have been opened out to create Centenary Square, so that Bradford Live sits alongside the Alhambra Theatre and the National Science & Media Museum, within a few minutes’ walk of St George’s Hall and on the doorstep of the University of Bradford campus.
The legal stalemate over the leaking roof of the Abbeydale Picture House threatens to bring down the ornate plaster ceiling of the auditorium.
A recent press-release from the lessee of the cinema, CADS [Creative Arts Development Space], stated that the building must be made weatherproof without delay, and the financial loss from the closure of the auditorium is becoming unsustainable: The uncertain future of a century-old Sheffield landmark (sheffieldtribune.co.uk) [scroll to ‘The Big Story’].
A detailed examination of the damage showed that the Apollo ceiling was weakened by the deterioration of hessian ties, called ‘wads’, that anchored the plasterwork to the roof structure: Apollo theatre ceiling collapse blamed on failure of old cloth ties | London | The Guardian. Water ingress was apparently the basic problem, weakening the hessian and adding to the weight of the plasterwork. There’s a partly redacted technical report on the Apollo collapse at Apollo-Theatre..pdf (abtt.org.uk).
There’s been no public statement to indicate exactly what is wrong with the Abbeydale Picture House roof, but it’s clear that if the ceiling collapsed its reinstatement would be costly and would delay plans for a full restoration.
In a recent blog-article I highlighted the successful restoration of Wingfield Station in Derbyshire after years of neglect. This came about because of a combination of forces. Local residents and the Amber Valley District Council worked with English Heritage and the not-for-profit Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust to put the station back in excellent order which will enable it to earn its keep in future.
Sheffield City Council has already played that card by channelling Levelling Up funds from central government to make the Adelphi Cinema, Attercliffe suitable for a lessee’s occupation, but the Abbeydale Picture House is a different proposition.
Firstly, it’s much bigger than Wingfield Station and though it’s structurally complete its integrity is seriously threatened by the ceiling vulnerability.
Secondly, it’s not the only landmark building in the city that presents a major conservation challenge. The Old Town Hall is older, more central, more complex, in far worse physical condition and extremely difficult to adapt to a practical future use.
Sheffield City Council is desperately short of money after years of budget cuts, and to finance non-essential services it’s forced to scavenge for ringfenced grants that can’t be spent on other priorities.
I spoke to someone who knows about such matters, and he said that the only solution was money – more money than ordinary individuals might raise in a hurry.
But the support of ordinary members of the public will help CADS, a not-for-profit organisation with a strong track record in repurposing redundant buildings for use in a variety of art forms.
Update: Within days of this article going online, on February 22nd 2024 CADS announced the immediate closure of the Abbeydale Picture House for lack of resources to make the auditorium safe, though they retain the tenancy agreement and hope to restore the building in the future: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-south-yorkshire-68371502.
To provide the best experiences, we use technologies like cookies to store and/or access device information. Consenting to these technologies will allow us to process data such as browsing behaviour or unique IDs on this site. Not consenting or withdrawing consent, may adversely affect certain features and functions.
Functional
Always active
The technical storage or access is strictly necessary for the legitimate purpose of enabling the use of a specific service explicitly requested by the subscriber or user, or for the sole purpose of carrying out the transmission of a communication over an electronic communications network.
Preferences
The technical storage or access is necessary for the legitimate purpose of storing preferences that are not requested by the subscriber or user.
Statistics
The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for statistical purposes.The technical storage or access that is used exclusively for anonymous statistical purposes. Without a subpoena, voluntary compliance on the part of your Internet Service Provider, or additional records from a third party, information stored or retrieved for this purpose alone cannot usually be used to identify you.
Marketing
The technical storage or access is required to create user profiles to send advertising, or to track the user on a website or across several websites for similar marketing purposes.
