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).