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.

Nothing came of this and the local community is making a heroic effort to revive the building and make it useful:  Derbyshire community event to save historic theatre and cinema.

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.

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.

They chose as their architect C Edmund Wilford of Leicester.  He designed the Regal Cinema, Walton-on-Thames and the Regal Cinema, Bridlington (both 1938 – the same year as the Northwick):  Bridlington’s hidden Art Deco gem | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

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.