Former Grand Cinema, Ryhope, now at Beamish Museum, Co Durham

The Grand Cinema, Ryhope, near Sunderland, is delightful, yet it’s the most ordinary small-town picture house you could imagine and it’s no longer in Ryhope.  Built in 1914 to seat just over nine hundred people, it’s basically an oblong brick box with a foyer, a balconied auditorium and a modest stage for live shows.  Its plaster decoration and stained glass made it cosy and attractive.  It was the only picture house in the pit town. 

Its subsequent history is conventional:  it was equipped for sound movies in 1930, converted to bingo in the 1960s and fitted out as a garage in 1997.  There are photographs of the decorative auditorium packed with cars before the building was emptied and dismantled from September 2020.

The Grand is typical of hundreds of small-scale cinemas, originally designed for silent movies with a musical accompaniment, which made it valuable to the Beamish Museum as a landmark in its 1950s town, where it has been transplanted and restored to show short local-history documentaries and period feature films as part of the Museum’s varied entertainment programme:  What’s on – Beamish Museum.  It opened on its new site on July 6th 2024.

Beamish Museum has built up an eclectic collection of structures and artefacts to illustrate “the development of industry and the way of life of the North of England” since it began in 1972.  The first director, Frank Atkinson (1924-2014), made it his mission to collect any and every historic item that people were willing to donate.  He was inundated.

To provide a convincing simulacrum of a past time, Frank Atkinson pursued a policy of acquiring complete buildings which were dismantled and translocated, and also replica structures that incorporate historic materials from a variety of locations.  The Grand Cinema is not a brick-by-brick reconstruction.  That was the initial intention, but the fabric turned out to be too fragile and dangerous to dismantle, so as many original features as possible were salvaged and incorporated in a new construction at the entrance to the 1950s town.

This approach has been criticised by some historians and museum professionals as inauthentic, but the purpose is to give future generations a vivid impression of how ordinary people lived from the early nineteenth century to the 1950s.  SPACE Architects of Newcastle “focused on creating a coherent townscape…rather than producing isolated replicas”:  Remaking Beamish 1950s Town | SPACE Architects.

Education should be enjoyable and accessible, and it’s now possible to sit in the stalls for a film show as well as eating fish and chips from a fake newspaper, riding on a heritage tram or bus or patting a pit pony.

Times have changed, however.  I noticed on my visit that when the national anthem was played at the end of the show, nobody stood up.  Nor did they race for the stairs as soon as they saw the final credits.

I’m grateful to Charles Hooton for his itinerary and excellent programme-notes for the Cinema Theatre Association tour ‘Silver Screens of Tyneside and Teeside’ (April 20th-23rd 2026).

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.