Category Archives: Fun Palaces: the history and architecture of the entertainment industry

Well-kept station

Great Malvern railway station, Worcestershire

Great Malvern railway station was built as the arrival and departure point for the elite visitors who flocked to the district to take water cures in the mid-Victorian period.

The spa resort thrived from the arrival of the Worcester & Hereford Railway in 1860, and the station at Great Malvern, opened in 1862, was the major hub for visitors, local inhabitants and freight. There were two other less important stations, Malvern Link to the north and Malvern Wells (closed in 1965) to the south.

The character of the station, like the rest of the town, was heavily influenced by Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900), the widowed Lady of the Manor, whose late husband’s will gave her independence and considerable influence. She disliked travelling through the two tunnels on the line, at Ledbury and Colwall, so she habitually travelled by road between her country seat at Stoke Edith and her private waiting room at Great Malvern.

The Gothic buildings at Great Malvern station were built in local Malvern Rag stone and designed by a local architect, Edmund Wallace Elmslie. He was responsible for the road bridge at the north end of the platforms and the remarkable iron columns which support the canopies on both platforms. The beautifully restored and brightly painted capitals are in twelve different designs, hand-forged in wrought iron, and serve to direct rainwater down the interior of each column.

Edmund Wallace Elmslie at the same time designed the Imperial Hotel across Avenue Road from the station. It was the largest hotel in Malvern, owned by the Great Malvern Hotel Company, chaired by the hydrotherapy pioneer Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883).

Its elaborate Gothic architecture is enlivened by carvings by the Worcester sculptor William Forsyth (c1834-1915), whose brother James created, among much else, the huge Perseus Fountain at Witley Court, Worcestershire.

In 1919 the hotel was bought for £32,500 by Miss Greenslade and Miss Poulton, the two founders of Malvern Girls’ College which dated from small beginnings in 1893 elsewhere in Malvern. A complex succession of amalgamations with Lawnside, The Abbey and St James’s School (all of which were founded by women) eventually created Malvern St James in 2006.

The hotel was directly connected with the station platform by a gently sloping covered passageway of brick, wood and corrugated iron which is known as The Worm, for reasons which are obvious when looking at it from the overbridge. It enabled guests with limited mobility to reach the hotel from the railway. There is a shorter underground goods tunnel north of passenger walkway.

There’s a regular train service to Great Malvern from Worcester and Hereford, and a bus-service up the hill to the town centre.

Lady Foley’s former private waiting room operated as Lady Foley’s Tea Room until it closed in October 2023.

Though there was a project in 2017 to restore The Worm, it’s currently inaccessible for safety reasons.

The water cure

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The Yorkshire town of Ilkley had a modest reputation as a spa from the early eighteenth century [No additives | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times] on the remarkable attribute that its mineral water was practically devoid of minerals.

Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), a Silesian peasant farmer, developed and patented hydrotherapy treatment, a system of baths, compresses and treatments involving wrapping patients in wet sheets, at Gräfenburg in Silesia in 1829. His procedures were satisfyingly uncomfortable, yet less life-threatening than other medical practices.

Captain Richard Tappin Claridge’s publication Hydropathy; or The Cold Water Cure, as practised by Vincent Priessnitz… (1842) encouraged the development of the first British hydropathic establishment at Malvern where the water had long been “famous for containing just nothing at all”.

Ilkley was quick to follow, when a consortium of Leeds businessmen opened a magnificent Scottish Baronial hydro named Ben Rhydding in 1844.

Ben Rhydding Hydropathic Establishment from “Ilkley, Ancient and Modern … Eighty illustrations” – PICRYL – Public Domain Media Search Engine Public Domain Search

The first resident physician, a Silesian, Dr Anthony Rischanek, left under some kind of a cloud, about which he harboured resentment for the rest of his life. He was succeeded by a leading proponent of the water-cure, Dr William Macleod, who established at Ben Rhydding the rigorous, wholesome lifestyle which initially characterised hydropathy.

The success of Ben Rhydding inevitably encouraged competitors. Wells House was established in 1853, at a cost of £30,000 in competition to Ben Rhydding, offering many of the same facilities at comparable prices.

The four-square turreted building, opened in 1856, was designed by Cuthbert Brodrick, who was at that time engaged in building Leeds Town Hall and would later create the Grand Hotel, Scarborough.

Smaller, less expensive hydros followed. Craiglands, which opened in 1859, boasted Dr Macleod’s services as “consulting physician”. Charging around £2 12s 0d per week, about a pound less than the Ben Rhydding and Wells House, Craiglands was repeatedly enlarged, until the original plain classical structure sprouted a dour and domineering Scottish Baronial extension.

The Troutbeck was financed by the then resident physician from Wells House, Dr Edmund Smith, and opened about a year before his death in 1864. Its medical practitioners were brought in from Wells House, including a Dr Harrison who combined hydropathic treatments with galvanism.

Other Ilkley hydros included the Grove (c1870, later the Spa), supervised by Dr Scott from Wells House, Sunset View (by 1871), Rockwood (1871), Marlborough House (1878), Stoney Lea (1883), run by a former bathman from Ben Rhydding, Mr Emmott, and Moorlands (1897).

Steadily towards the end of the nineteenth century the hydros’ therapeutic purpose was diluted by increasing demand from guests for leisure facilities. Chambers’ Encyclopaedia of 1906 commented that “most [so-called hydros] originally started with [the] full equipment for treatment, including a resident physician…but many now are merely high-class country boarding-houses”.

In the twentieth century every one of the Ilkley establishments declined and closed. Ben Rhydding closed permanently at the start of the Second World War and was demolished in 1955. After wartime requisition Wells House became a college of further education and is now luxury apartments; Craiglands is now a hotel and Troutbeck was until recently a care home. The Spa and Rockwood were converted into flats, and Marlborough House and Stoney Lea have been demolished.

Memorial of Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851), formerly at Ben Rhydding, now at Canker Well, Ilkley, West Yorkshire

Water is best

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Rose Garrard, Malvhina drinking fountain, Great Malvern, Worcestershire

Great Malvern is a pleasant place. It’s populated by smart-looking ladies with Waitrose carrier bags and relaxed gents sitting around reading hardback books indoors or outdoors according to the weather. It’s long been a place to retire to, whether transitorily or permanently.

“Malvern” is a portmanteau placename for a cluster of small settlements – Great Malvern, Little Malvern, West Malvern, Malvern Wells and Malvern Link – all of which lie at the foot of the Malvern Hills ridge, where ancient Pre-Cambrian rocks provide prolific quantities of pure water from as many as 240 natural springs.

The name itself derives from Old Welsh, meaning “bald hill” and in modern Welsh rendered as moelfryn. This is associated with the name of a Gaelic goddess Malvhina, who was resurrected from obscurity by the local writer and photographer Charles Frederick Grindrod (1847-1910) and is commemorated by Rose Garrard’s 1998 fountain on Belle Vue Terrace.

Great Malvern grew up around the impressive eleventh-century Priory, of which the Perpendicular church survives because it was bought by the parishioners after the Dissolution. The only other remnant of the priory is the gatehouse, the home of the Malvern Museum of Local History.

Malvern water was esteemed from the seventeenth century, but was not widely known outside the local area. Dr John Wall (1708-1776) promoted it in a pamphlet entitled Experiments and observations on the Malvern Water (1756), which a critic summarised in an ironic couplet:

The Malvern water, says Doctor John Wall,
Is famed for containing just nothing at all.

We must remember that until the nineteenth century, pure water was a rarity. Most people drank small beer, cider or mead if they could get it. Tea, coffee and drinking chocolate were outlandish luxuries, accessible only to the very rich.

Gradually, through the eighteenth and into the nineteenth century, Malvern’s trade in its natural water grew.

The two most celebrated Malvern wells are St Ann’s Well which the Lady of the Manor, Lady Emily Foley (1805-1900) encouraged by extending the existing building in 1841 and, in Malvern Wells, the Holy Well which became the base for Schweppes’ bottling plant from 1850. Both these wells specifically made Malvern water available to local people.

The district was transformed by the arrival in 1842 of Dr James Wilson (1807-1867) and Dr James Manby Gully (1808-1883), leading exponents of hydrotherapy, the highly popular but ultimately controversial water treatment developed by Dr Vinzenz Priessnitz (1799-1851) at Grafenburg, Silesia.

The pair set up clinics in Malvern (Holyrood House for women and Tudor House for men) and were joined by other practitioners to make the area famous.

The railway from Worcester to Malvern Link opened in 1859, and a succession of distinguished figures – among them Charles Darwin and Florence Nightingale – visited and took away glowing recommendations of the benefits of taking the Malvern waters. Indeed, Malvern water has been preferred by British monarchs from Queen Elizabeth I to Queen Elizabeth II. Queen Victoria refused to travel without it.

Enthusiasm for being wrapped in wet blankets at the crack of dawn declined by the beginning of the twentieth century, but Malvern’s quiet charms remained attractive, and the hydros and large residences were easily converted to boarding schools, of which Malvern College (1862), Abbey College (1874) and Malvern St James (1893) remain in operation.

As an education centre, Malvern encouraged cultural activities. Sir Edward Elgar (1857-1934), who was born near Worcester and grew up in the city, spent much of his life in and around Malvern and Hereford: ELGAR – The Elgar Trail. Rose Gifford’s Elgar Fountain (2000) on Belle Vue Terrace incorporates a statue of the composer.

The Head of English at Malvern College, George Sayer (1914-2005), knew both C S Lewis (1898-1963) and J R R Tolkien (1892-1973). Lewis had been a student of George Sayer, who became his biographer, and he introduced his Oxford University colleague Tolkien to Sayer and to Malvern and its hills. C S Lewis is said to have been inspired to write the opening of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (1950) by a snowy street lit by Great Malvern’s characteristic gas lamps.

Malvern is a healthy, comfortable place whether you’re growing towards adulthood or reaping the rewards of a working life, and in between it’s an admirable base for exploring a beautiful part of England, resonant with history and culture.

Note: The Malvern Museum of Local History is closed for refurbishment from November 2025 and is planned to reopen on March 28th 2026: Welcome to Malvern Museum – Malvern Museum of Local History.

Save Derby Hippodrome?

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Hippodrome Theatre, Derby – seating newly reupholstered (1993)

Sometimes, when news breaks of a historic building been damaged or lost by corporate vandalism I think the UK’s legislative protection for heritage is unfit for purpose.

That’s not actually true. It could work if it was applied seriously: Demolition Of Listed Buildings: Is It Legal? – Christopher David Design – Architecture & Design Solutions In Surrey.

A restricted form of protection for ancient monuments has existed in England and Wales since 1882 but the widespread destruction of towns and cities in the Second World War triggered the Town and Country Planning Act, 1947 providing blanket protection to listed buildings.

There are potentially severe penalties for damaging, destroying or carrying out unauthorised works on a listed building: a Crown Court can impose an unlimited fine and/or two years in prison, and can issue a confiscation order to reclaim profits made from the offence.

The greatest threat to heritage buildings is, inevitably, money – the shortage of public money and the excess of corporate and private fortunes.

A league table of heritage-crime offences up to 2018 indicates that even the heaviest “unlimited” fines are pocket money to property developers and affluent private individuals: HISTORIC BUILDINGS PROSECUTION FINES.

Local authorities, starved of funds for over fifteen years, struggle to preserve education, adult social care and housing and much else. Preservation of old buildings comes a long way down their priorities.

Marie Clements’, the Victorian Society’s Communications and Media Manager, highlights the lack of staff to protect threatened buildings in one of the nation’s largest cities, Birmingham: News from the Victorian Society | Heritage skills crisis in local government.

One of the most instructive controversies over a building that remained intact until less than twenty years ago is the Derby Hippodrome, which earned its keep from opening as a theatre in 1914 until it closed as a bingo club in 2007, the year after it was listed Grade II.

It was acquired by Mr Christopher Anthony who after a small fire proceeded to repair the damage by taking an excavator to the roof: Bringing the house down | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times. Mr Anthony was eventually awarded a conditional discharge after admitting ordering work on the building without permission, and later went into administration.

The theatre has ever since stood open to the elements while well-meaning bodies made repeated attempts to set up a restoration programme, led by the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust (formed in 2010), joined later by the Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust and the Theatres Trust, and overseen by Derby City Council.

These efforts were hampered by the difficulty of identifying the building’s current owners.

Companies House lists businesses trading with the name Christopher or Chris Anthony but no such individual of that name is listed: CHRISTOPHER ANTHONY PROPERTY SERVICES LIMITED people – Find and update company information – GOV.UK.

Blake Finance Ltd is repeatedly mentioned in the local press as being responsible for the Hippodrome, but the actual connection with the Derby Hippodrome is opaque: Hippodrome Theatre: Urgent works notice needs to be served on owner but who is that? | Derbyshire Live.

A succession of fires in May 2025 prompted Derby City Council to undertake a rapid, radical demolition of the remains of the proscenium and front stalls on safety grounds.

Historic England, the Derby Hippodrome Restoration Trust, Derby Civic Society and Derbyshire Historic Buildings Trust challenged this action within forty-eight hours, and work stopped.

An urban explorer, MotionlessMike, has posted a collection of images from May 2023 to show how much of the building remained until the recent series of what many believe were arson attacks: Report – – Derby Hippodrome – The End (2025) | Theatres and Cinemas | 28DaysLater Urban Exploring Forums.

Contributors to the Save Derby Hippodrome Facebook stream [SAVE DERBY HIPPODROME | Facebook] include individuals who clearly understand the technicalities of demolition and neighbours who witnessed the successive demolitions that have overtaken the structure.

There’s a comprehensive survey and discussion of the Hippodrome scandal by John Forkin at And so, the Derby Hippodrome may soon be no more… – Marketing Derby.

And so the remnants of this Grade-II listed once fully restorable theatre remain, and its supporters are yet trying to find a way of saving them: Theatre at Risk Derby Hippodrome demolished.

Nottingham Playhouse

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When I visited Nottingham Playhouse recently to see my friend Andrea in a superlative production of Aaron Sorkin’s play based on Harper Lee’s novel To Kill a Mockingbird [To Kill A Mockingbird] I felt an immediate sense of nostalgia when I entered the auditorium.

When the Playhouse opened in 1963 I was in the middle of my grammar-school education and by the time we reached the sixth form the following year our English teachers had formed a rota to take us by coach once a month on a Friday evening to see whatever was on in the Playhouse’s opening seasons which were directed principally by John Neville (1925-2011).

Neville shared his role of artistic director at first with Frank Dunlop (b1927), who went on to found the Young Vic in 1969, and the polymathic Peter Ustinov (1921-2004). Between them they brought to Nottingham a broad range of classic drama and a scintillating troupe of talented actors.

Therefore, in our teens, we were privileged to see – live on stage – not only John Neville’s Richard II, Oedipus and Willy Loman in Death of a Salesman, but the twenty-something Judi Dench as Margery Pinchwife in William Wycherley’s bawdy Restoration comedy The Country Wife, which had us rolling about in our front-row seats, even if some of us didn’t at first twig the pun in the title.

These opportunities were unrepeatable: Neville resigned in 1969 because the theatre’s grant was repeatedly frozen; nowadays theatre seat-prices are elevated beyond most school budgets, especially when big-name performers are cast. Indeed, Nottingham Playhouse runs a laudable 50:50 Appeal, which enables audiences to donate the cost of tickets for local people who otherwise wouldn’t experience live theatre: 50:50 Appeal – Nottingham Playhouse.

I’m pleased to see that Peter Moro’s theatre, with the circular drum of the auditorium prominent above the rectilinear outer shell, has been respectfully restored: Moro had been involved in the Royal Festival Hall project, and for Nottingham created a conventional proscenium theatre that encloses its audience so they share the same space as the actors.

And on the night I was there the To Kill a Mockingbird tour filled every seat in the house as it storms around the country on its way to a West End run in August 2026: TOUR — To Kill A Mockingbird.

The Abbeydale Picture House – Sheffield’s premier suburban cinema

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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

Crown & Kettle

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Researching the history and architecture of public houses is a minefield. Documentation is widely scattered, images are variable in quality and often undated, and personal memories are often vague because they’re born of habit.

The Crown & Kettle on the corner of Great Ancoats Street and Oldham Road north of Manchester’s city centre has a coherent story that’s repeatedly told but some of the details are open to debate.

The name is unusual, but not as strange as the earlier name, the “Iron Dish & Cob of Coal”. Neither has been satisfactorily explained.

The earliest reference to a building on the site is dated 1734 and indicates it was used as a courthouse, and the connection with justice leads to unlikely tales of a secret tunnel to Strangeways Prison (built 1866-68) and “hanging pits” beneath the gents’ lavatory.

The eighteenth-century building isn’t the present-day two-storey pub. Neil Richardson’s The Old Pubs of Ancoats (2016) cites a directory of 1800 and includes an 1820 sketch of a three-storey, eighteenth-century building with a distinctive sign of a crown and a kettle.

The Manchester Evening News (August 26th 1976) mentions that the Crown & Kettle held a drinks licence by 1799. There are repeated newspaper advertisements for auctions on the premises from 1800 onwards.

Whatever its origins the current grand building with a high-ceilinged ground floor makes an excellent hostelry and has been a landmark for something like the better part of two centuries. Its interior is memorable for its elaborate Gothic plaster ceiling and the huge pendants which originally carried gasolier lighting fixtures.

Until the 1990s the snug had mahogany panelling which allegedly came from the R101 airship. This seems unlikely because the R101 was destroyed when it crashed and burst into flames near Beauvais, northern France, in October 1930 killing 48 passengers and crew. It’s possible that the panelling actually came from the R100, which was grounded and scrapped after the R101 tragedy.

In the mid-twentieth century the Crown & Kettle was a popular watering hole for journalists and printers from the Daily Express building next door. One history-forum contributor blamed the pub for the paper’s “speeling mistakes”. There’s a story that the Express photographer Jack Kay used to visit with his pet duck, which was teetotal and drank water from an ashtray.

The Crown & Kettle was listed Grade II in 1974. It was closed after an altercation on February 3rd 1990 between supporters of Manchester United and Manchester City that was variously described as a “fight”, a “riot” and “like the Wild West”, and according to the Manchester Evening News caused £30,000-worth of damage. Every member of staff on duty was injured.

A subsequent arson attack ruined the mahogany panelling in the snug.

It remained closed until 2005 when, with assistance from English Heritage, the ceiling was partly restored, leaving the remainder “as found”. After a change of ownership and a further refurbishment in 2000-2001 some of the interior walls were stripped back to the brickwork.

These vicissitudes have enhanced the atmosphere and appeal of the place. It was awarded the Greater Manchester CAMRA regional Pub of the Year 2015 and the Central Manchester Pub of the Year 2019.

The Crown & Kettle is a star in Manchester’s city-centre constellation of fine pubs. Its history is lengthy and robust, and loses nothing in the telling.

Reawakening the Premier Electric Theatre

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Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (2025)

Premier Electric Theatre, Somercotes, Derbyshire (1977)

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.

Northwick Cinema, Worcester

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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.

Pride of Blackpool

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Basil Newby, the founder and proprietor of the Blackpool cabaret bar Funny Girls, has announced his intention to retire and has put the business on the market: Basil Newby: Blackpool’s pioneering drag bar owner to retire – BBC News.

He breathed new life into the resort’s declining tourist economy when he founded the Flamingo night club in 1979 before taking over the vast derelict Odeon Cinema and transforming it into Funny Girls in 2002: Funny Girls | Mike Higginbottom Interesting Times.

He had difficulty gaining a licence for the Flamingo because he refused to conceal his sexuality [When Basil Newby opened Blackpool’s first gay club, his solicitor had one question – LancsLive], yet when he opened Funny Girls the guest of honour was Joan Collins.

Funny Girls was and is inclusive, offering high-quality dance-entertainment introduced by a sharp-tongued compère, alongside the option of a pre-performance dinner, to gay and straight patrons.

Staid Lancashire businessmen at one time found it hard to believe that the glamorous girls on stage and the waitresses who served dinner were in fact men.

Straight Sheffield footballers of my acquaintance, and their girlfriends, made repeat visits because they thought the show was “a reyt laff”.

It’s a measure both of Basil’s achievement and the transformation of British culture since the 1990s that he has collected tributes ranging from a private box at the Grand Theatre to an MBE for services to business and to the LGBTQIA+ community.

And it’s heartening to see that he’s appointed the auctioneers Christie & Co specifically to find a suitable buyer to continue the venue’s proud tradition intact: Funny Girls drag cabaret bar in Blackpool for sale | Christie & Co.

Long may the old Odeon continue to offer holidaymakers what Dr Samuel Johnson called “the publick stock of harmless pleasure [and] the gaiety of nations”: Our Story | Funny Girls.

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