Monthly Archives: October 2025

The Abbeydale Picture House – Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema

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Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield (1977)

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 see sample pages, please click here.

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

Heinz Memorial Chapel

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Heinz Memorial Chapel, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

The Philadelphia architect Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938) demonstrated how the Gothic architectural tradition could express the dignity and function of academic architecture in his Cathedral of Learning, completed in 1937 as part of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. 

Alongside the Cathedral in the same years he applied the same blend of historicism and modernity to design two other neo-Gothic structures for the University.

The Stephen Collins Foster Memorial (1937) provided two theatre spaces for the Department of Theatre Arts and accommodation for the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum and the Stephen Foster Collection and archive, which is regarded as particularly important because Foster’s brother Morrison Foster destroyed or dispersed many of his papers after his death.  It houses the twelve-sided Stephen Foster Shrine, which displays the composer’s sheet music and memorabilia.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is regarded as “the father of American music” as the composer of such minstrel songs as ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Old Folks at Home’ (‘Swanee River’) – a mixed legacy, in which well-loved melodies are tied to lyrics that are now regarded as racially-inflected and widely disliked.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel (1938) was initially conceived by Henry John Heinz (1844-1919), the Pittsburgh-born founder of the food-processing company, as a memorial to his mother, but was extended after his death by additional bequests from his three surviving children. 

It was gifted to the University and “dedicated to culture, understanding response to beauty, and religious worship” as an interdenominational place of worship which is open to all members of the University community, employees of the H J Heinz Company and the general public.

Unlike the Cathedral of Learning, a tower which reaches 535ft into the heavens, the Heinz Memorial Chapel is a traditional cruciform church with tall, narrow proportions, many Gothic arches and pinnacles, surmounted by a fleche 256 feet above ground level.

The interior is a series of lofty French Gothic vaults, decorated with elaborate sequences of sculpture by Joseph Gattoni, and drenched in daytime by the light of predominantly blue stained glass by the prominent stained-glass artist Charles Jay Connick (1875-1945), who was responsible for the entire sequence of the chapel’s many huge windows.

The proximity of three ambitious neo-Gothic buildings in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus is remarkable, memorable and leaves an indelible impression, particularly on those fortunate enough to come to the city of steel and heavy industry to study.

Cathedral of Learning

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Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: Commons Room

The nineteenth-century Gothic Revival was influential in the USA and maintained momentum until the Second World War.

Nineteenth-century Gothic buildings were usually scholarly versions of European originals, like New York City’s Trinity Church (1846) and St Patrick’s Cathedral (1879/1888).

Subsequent neo-Gothic buildings in the States are more varied, grand and original, especially when their designs merged with the quintessentially American invention of the skyscraper.

I’ve been fortunate to enjoy the Woolworth Building (1913) and Riverside Church (1929) in New York City, Grace Cathedral (1924-64) in San Francisco and the Tribune Tower (1922-25) in Chicago, but the richest, most fascinating, downright peculiar example of American Gothic I know is the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.

This astonishing structure is a 42-storey tower containing lecture facilities, research and library areas and study and social facilities for the University of Pittsburgh. Its construction took from 1926 to 1937.

It was the brain-child of John Gabbert Bowman (1877-1962), chancellor of the university 1921-45, who envisaged a landmark building dominating the city:  “…more than a schoolhouse; it was to be a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live”.

He commissioned Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938), one of the foremost American architects of his generation who continued to develop the neo-Gothic style in the age of Art Deco.

On land given by the banker and industrialist Andrew William Mellon (1855-1937), Charles Klauder created a monumental building that fulfilled all the requisite criteria – ample space for a multiplicity of purposes, a powerful impact on the Pittsburgh townscape and a rich source of imaginative art and craftsmanship.

The most awe-inspiring space in the Cathedral is the four-storey Commons [sic] Room, 52 feet high and covering half an acre of floor-space, where students are guaranteed quiet for private study.  The Perpendicular Gothic columns and vaults are functioning masonry arches, independent of the steel frame which supports the higher storeys.

The first and third floors surrounding the Commons Room are largely given over to the Nationality Rooms that John G Bowman handed over in 1926 to representatives of the nationalities that made up Pittsburgh’s diverse communities.  Each community was responsible for the entire cost of fitting out the rooms, after which the University undertook to maintain them in perpetuity.

The English Room, for example, is decorated with materials rescued from the bombed House of Commons at the end of the Second World War.  It was dedicated in 1952, and contains portraits of Andrew Mellon and William Pitt, the Prime Minster after whom the city is named.  Separate classrooms are dedicated to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Turkish Room includes a large ceramic portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, instructing his people about the Turkish alphabet introduced in 1928 in place of the Arabic script.

There are currently thirty-one Nationality Rooms, from African Heritage to Yugoslavia, of which all but two are functioning classrooms.  Most of them still have blackboards, though the Korean Room, dedicated in 2015, was the first to instal an LED screen and central speaker system.

Detailed descriptions of all the Nationality Rooms can be found at Nationality Rooms – Wikipedia.

The highest level of the tower available to the public is the Federick Honors College on the 35th and 36th floors.  The views are spectacular.

The Cathedral of Learning is freely accessible to members of the public.  I ate chicken nuggets and fries in the student refectory in the basement.  You can’t always do that at British cathedrals of learning.