Monthly Archives: July 2026

Footfall for old cinemas

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Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland

Former Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, Northumberland: proscenium viewed from front balcony

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham

Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, Co Durham: proscenium and light fountains from balcony

One of the admirable features of the J D Wetherspoon pub chain is that they’re kind to old buildings.  I’ve previously written blog-articles celebrating their Tunbridge Wells Opera House and Palladium Cinema, Llandudno.

Thanks to Charles Hootons’ itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026), I’ve visited and learned about the Grade II listed Wallaw Cinema, Blyth, designed by Charles Alfred Harding of the Newcastle practice Percy Lindsay Browne, Son & Harding and opened on November 16th 1937.

The style of the brick and concrete exterior is the toned-down version of Art Deco that is termed Moderne, but the interior is more exciting with Art Deco detail in the staircase of the impressive foyer and a fine auditorium with plaster coves by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland and concealed lighting by Devereux Moody & Co Ltd of Newcastle.  It originally seated 1,600.

The name “Wallaw” is derived from the name of its owner Walter Lawson whose Ashington-based cinema chain ran several picture houses in the area.

The Blyth Wallaw was tactfully subdivided in 1987 and refurbished in 1998, the year that it was listed, but it closed in 2004.

J D Wetherspoons took it on and celebrated its original intact architecture and decoration, and it opened as a pub on December 10th 2013 as The Wallaw.  An original projector and a sample row of seats are exhibited in the foyer.  It’s in good hands, thriving, and though it’s a pub you can clearly see it was a cinema.

Charles Hooton’s tour also took us to the Globe Cinema, Stockton-on-Tees, another magnificent Thirties cinema which is, after some vicissitudes, still a cinema.

The Globe was designed by the same architect as the Wallaw – Percy Lindsay Browne of Newcastle – and the interior plasterwork was by Webster Davidson & Co Ltd of Sunderland.  The third cinema on the site, it opened on April 20th 1935 as a variety theatre.  Its original seating capacity is variously recorded between 2,372 and 2,574.  

The proscenium is 49ft 2in wide:  the stage area is 39ft 2in deep and the grid sixty feet high.  The foyer leads into the circle level, so the stalls and stage are below street level and the backstage get-in is three metres above the floor and has to be accessed by a lift.

The building was acquired by Associated British Cinemas in 1937 and rebranded as ABC in 1967.  In the 1960s the Globe hosted big-ticket concerts featuring stars from Buddy Holly to Chuck Berry as well as the Beatles and the Rolling Stones.

It closed as a cinema in 1974 and, after a London Philharmonic Orchestra concert the following year, became a bingo hall.  Bingo ended in 1997, and the building remained dark for over twenty years.

It could so easily have gone, but Stockton-on-Tees Borough Council resolved to restore it, at an eventual cost of £27.9 million, of which the National Lottery fund contributed £4.5 million.

The restoration, designed by SPACE Architects (whose Remaking Beamish project embraced the 1950 town including the Grand Cinema) and undertaken by Willmott Dixon Interiors (who also refurbished the Granada Cinema, Walthamstow in 2025):  Globe Theatre, Stockton-on-Tees | Willmott Dixon.

The Globe reopened in 2021 and is now configured for a seated audience of 1,650, with capacity for 3,034 for standing events.  A former bridalwear shop next door has become a stylish box-office and bar/café.  The Globe is operated on a 25-year contract by the Ambassador Group.

It’s evident that even in a time of economic stagnation, local councils with vision – and enlightened operators like J D Wetherspoon and the Ambassador Group – can find funds to revive heritage cinema buildings that will pay their way by attracting people through their doors and enrich the local economy.

St Enedoc’s

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St Enodoc's Church, Trebetheric, Cornwall [Matthew Lemin]
St Enodoc’s Church, Trebetheric, Cornwall [Matthew Lemin]

One of the first novels I ever remember reading in childhood was Nine Bright Shiners by Lois Lamplugh, and I instantly recognised its dustcover on eBay recently and bought a copy.

The writings of Lois Lamplugh (1921-2013) are manifold – much fiction, especially for children, biography and books about the area of north Devon around Barnstaple where she was born.

Nine Bright Shiners was published in 1955, which means I must have read it when it was new and I was eight or nine years old.

Its main characters are a group of young people, well-mannered, energetic, forever organising picnics and lighting camp fires while on holiday from boarding school, who become intrigued by the legend of a church buried in the coastal dunes near their homes.

It’s a conventional example of its genre:  the characters are cardboard and the plot ticks along like a well-oiled clock.  The children’s parents exist only in the background, a source of food for picnics and tools to borrow.  One older gent is pivotal to the plot, and there is one necessary group of stock villains.  All of them could be sourced from Central Casting.

I enjoyed every minute of it, as I did five decades ago, when I was all for digging up the sand dunes when we went on holiday to Llandudno.  It didn’t happen, because my parents weren’t from Central Casting.

When I revisited the novel recently, I wondered if Lois Lamplugh was thinking of an actual church, over the border in Cornwall which was buried in the dunes for centuries.

Perhaps she was aware of the story of St Enedoc’s Church, which stands beside the estuary of the River Camel near Trebetherick in Cornwall.  I was taken to see it when I was a guest of Bodmin Decorative & Fine Arts Society some years ago.

For at least three hundred years, until the middle of the nineteenth century, St Enedoc’s was buried by the sand dunes that still surround it, so that the vicar and clerk – and perhaps some parishioners – had to gain entry through a hole in the roof once a year to conduct a service that guaranteed the right to collect tithes.

The building was uncovered at the instigation of a local vicar and in 1863-64 it was restored by the architect James Piers St Aubyn (1815-1895).

The family of Sir John Betjeman (1906-1984) kept a residence nearby:  the poet’s father has a memorial inside the church and Sir John himself is buried in the churchyard.  He wrote about the church in the poem ‘Sunday Afternoon Service in St Enodoc Church, Cornwall’.

There are two other poignant modern memorials at St Enedoc’s – one to the three crew-members killed in the wreck of the Maria Assumpta (1995), carved by Philip Chatfield, one of the survivors;  the other the grave of Fleur Lombard QGM (1974-1996), the first female firefighter to die on duty in peacetime Britain.  She is also commemorated by a plaque near to the supermarket where she died in Bristol.

The church and the stories are detailed at St Enodoc (greatenglishchurches.co.uk).