Former Manor Cinema, Manor Top, Sheffield

The most intriguing of all the surviving Sheffield picture-houses is the Manor Cinema (1927) at the top of Prince of Wales Road.

Like the Hillsborough Park Cinema this was until recently a supermarket, latterly operating as a Tesco. When you walked in off the street there was no hint that until 1969 it was an auditorium.

But the oddity about the Manor Cinema is that it was built into a steep hillside, and the street-level access led into a wide foyer and then into the circle. The stalls-area was downstairs.

Indeed, the Manor was unusual for having two balconies: the three tiers were described as saloon, first balcony and second balcony.

Below the first balcony, and behind the saloon, was a basement billiard hall, with three additional private billiard rooms which projected beyond the building line under the street pavement.

This was the work of Pascal Stienlet, who had previously worked in Sheffield at the Abbeydale Picture House (1920), which also stands on a sloping site and had a ballroom and billiard hall below the auditorium and stage.  He also designed the Majestic Cinema, Leeds (1922).

Before the Tesco store closed I was told that there was no access to the parts of the building that aren’t in practical use.  A Poundland store currently occupies an area equivalent to the original foyer.

Apparently, the last time the building was surveyed was when Tesco took it over in 2010.

It would be an interesting revelation to discover if, like the Hillsborough Park Cinema, anything of the auditorium remains.

Former Hillsborough Park Cinema, Middlewood Road, Sheffield

Sheffield has two Grade II listed cinemas, the Adelphi and the Abbeydale. Of the others remaining, one of the best and most surprising survivals is the Hillsborough Park Cinema of 1921.

Its elegant brick and faience façade, vaguely classical but with mullion-and-transom windows, decorates the streetscape on the tram-route at Parkside Road.

An English Heritage inspector would no doubt turn up his or her nose at the place, because when you walk through the door you’re in a perfectly conventional Asda supermarket. There’s hardly any indication that this was once a picture palace.

But thirty-odd years ago, when the Sheffield journalist Steve McClarence and I went exploring for his ‘Sheffielder’ column, we were taken through a door back into the 1950s, climbed the staircase to the circle, and found ourselves on the balcony, devoid of seating but otherwise intact.

There was the proscenium, and the clock, and through the panels of the suspended ceiling that fills the void in front of the balcony, we could glimpse unsuspecting customers trundling their trolleys.

Back downstairs we tried to run a trolley by gravity towards the screen end, but the floor has been levelled.

We thought this rather a pity, though practical.

Former Wincobank Picture Palace, Sheffield

Sometimes, when you explore old buildings, the least prepossessing places still produce surprises.

Wincobank, round the corner from the huge modern Meadowhall shopping centre, was very much a separate community from both Sheffield and Rotherham until well after the First World War. There were two railway stations, one called ‘Wincobank and Meadow Hall’, the other ‘Meadow Hall and Wincobank’, but electric trams never came near and the bus-service was sparse.

Wincobank people looked for their entertainment to the 550-seat Wincobank Picture Palace, opened in 1914 and operated at least from the 1920s by the Wadsworth family, who also owned the nearby, long-vanished Tinsley Picture Palace.

After the Wincobank Picture Palace closed in February 1959 it was used by a plumbers’ merchant, now operated by the Graham chain [http://www.grahamplumbersmerchant.co.uk/branch-locator/?location=Wincobank].

The outside of the building is in beautiful condition, but in the course of fifty-odd years of industrial use the interior has been heavily beaten up.

The manager, Mick Adams, encouraged me to take a good look round, mainly because the balcony front, installed in 1926 to add a hundred extra seats, is visible and largely intact.

Otherwise, the proscenium has disappeared and all the plasterwork from the walls has been stripped away, though the shallow barrel ceiling with its ventilators remains.

The floor has been levelled and an extra level has been built out from the balcony, but it’s clear that the original raked floor and balcony flooring remain.

I did my best to contrive a series of photographs to illustrate my forthcoming presentation at Sheffield City Libraries, and then Mick mentioned the staircase that his staff don’t use to get upstairs.

He opened a door by the front entrance, to reveal the original staircase to the balcony, now used only for storage, beautifully preserved and tiled in cream, brown and chocolate, with wooden handrails intact.

It was like stepping back into the 1920s.

Mick tells me that under the floor at the entrance there remains a mosaic design with the words ‘Wincobank Picture Palace’.

You never know what you’ll find…

Update:  The Wincobank Picture Palace was advertised for sale with a guide-price of £199,000 in May 2020:  https://colloco.co/find-a-property/properties/1006-5-merton-road-sheffield.  It’ll be interesting to see if a buyer makes any use of the remaining historic features of this much altered building.

Further update:  A planning application has been lodged to convert the Picture Palace into apartments, which would provide a practical opportunity to incorporate the remaining historic features but would necessitate windows in the existing outside walls.

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Former Darnall Picture Palace, Staniforth Road, Sheffield

I first explored the surviving cinema buildings in Sheffield for the South Yorkshire Group of the Victorian Society circa 1983.

I’ve been asked to give a presentation at Sheffield City Library, so I decided to do a further survey of what is left of the fifty-odd auditoria that were built in the city up to the start of the Second World War.

One of the most attractive survivals – well cared-for though not intact – is the former Darnall Picture Palace, designed by Walter Gerald Buck and opened in 1913. Because the Darnall Picture Palace isn’t really in Darnall, and there was also a Darnall Cinema, locals called it the Balfour, because it was on the corner of Balfour Road, and by 1931 the proprietors were using that name in their advertising.

After it closed in 1959 the building was used by Clarks of Retford for their dry-cleaning business, and it’s now a quirky carpet showroom, run by a family firm as Balfour Carpets: http://www.balfourcarpets.com.

The mock-medieval castellated exterior is a landmark on the main road, and the barrel-ceiling interior has particularly fine fibrous plasterwork.

The sides of the proscenium arch remain, with faint traces of gilding, though the top of the arch has disappeared.

There was no overhanging balcony, though in 1920 the auditorium was extended to provide a raised rear section. It’s difficult to discern among the rolls of carpets exactly how this was done.

Ryan Jackson, one of the owners, who showed me round, took me upstairs to the staff room where there remains one of the hatches of the projection suite, still in situ.

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

Since Phil Robins took ownership of the former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield, he’s tidied up the interior so that at last it’s possible to see the entire auditorium from the back of the stalls or the back of the balcony.  The stage remains a forest of scaffolding until the stage-tower roof is made weather-tight.

When the Sheffield Antiques Quarter Christmas Market took place at the Abbeydale I was asked to show people the auditorium, a privilege that gave me opportunity to learn more about the building.

Insurance restrictions meant that visitors were not allowed on the stage or in the circle, so I provided a PowerPoint sequence showing the angles that weren’t accessible.

Talking to people who visited the cinema regularly from the 1950s to the 1970s suggested that there were at least four colour schemes over the years:

• pale and deep cream and gold from the opening in 1920
• pale green and gold sometime up to the early 1950s when Cinemascope was introduced
• white or cream until at least the end of the 1960s
• the current blue, claret and cream by the beginning of the 1970s

There may have been other colour schemes that only a paint analysis will reveal:  planning documents indicate, for instance, that a major refurbishment took place in 1928 and Clifford Shaw, in Sheffield Cinemas (Sheffield Cinema Society/Tempus 2001) p 101, shows a monochrome image of a decorative scheme that dates from August 1949.

I’m told I was introduced on the PA system as the Abbeydale’s “resident historian”, which led a friend to enquire if I had a flat in the projection room.

He’d no reason to know that in the late 1970s there was a flat in the projection suite after A & F Drake Ltd took it over as an office-equipment showroom.  Later in the day I met a lady who had lived in the flat for a couple of years.

She said that her dad and his mate had spent a night in the auditorium seeking ghostly presences.  The only presence that appeared was her cat.

Oddly, even later in the afternoon a lady asked me about the psychic history of the Abbeydale.  I had to say I didn’t know there was one, but I was able to point her towards the only accredited haunted cinema, the Don on West Bar, which still exists.

People were reassured to know that Phil’s plan to use the Abbeydale as a climbing centre won’t damage the listed interior:  all the climbing installations will be free-standing.  Indeed, one climber, a regular visitor to Phil’s existing centre, The Edge [http://www.sheffieldclimbing.com], said he was looking forward to sitting in the circle with a cup of coffee watching other climbers.

Update:  I read in the Sheffield Cinema Society June 2014 newsletter that Phil Robins has changed his plans:  the climbing-centre project at the Abbeydale isn’t going ahead – indeed, Phil has closed his other climbing centre, The Edge,– and the snooker club has moved out of the Abbeydale’s former ballroom in the basement.  For the first time in its history the entire building is empty.

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield

I reported in July 2012 that the Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield had been bought by Phil Robins, the owner of The Edge [http://www.sheffieldclimbing.com/index.php], an indoor climbing centre near to Bramall Lane football ground.

Phil showed me round the Abbeydale last month and allowed me to photograph the improvements he’s so far made while making the building secure and weather-tight.

The two major changes he’s made are to lower the iron safety-curtain to its proper level, so that it can be seen in its entirety for the first time for many years, and to remove the partition that divided the balcony from the rest of the auditorium when the Abbeydale was used as an office-equipment showroom.

At present, therefore, it’s possible to see the entire auditorium space as it existed in the mid-1950s.  The only feature that is not original is the false proscenium that was inserted when Cinemascope was installed.  The sides of the narrower original 1920 classical-detailed proscenium are visible, but not the top which, according to the opening-night description in the Sheffield Independent, displayed “a chaste panel of Grecian figures on a background of pale blue”.

The original decorative scheme was pale and deep cream with gold;  the 1920s proscenium is now a faded pale green trimmed with gold, and the rest of the auditorium is a strident concoction of blue, claret and cream.  (The lighter colours now visible may, of course, be tempered with nicotine.)

Phil intends to restore the interior space as far as possible to its original state, and to install free-standing climbing equipment which will not affect the listed decorative features.

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield (1984)

The Sheffield Star reported in June 2012 that the Abbeydale Cinema, which has been run as a not-for-profit community venue, was threatened with closure:  http://www.thestar.co.uk/news/money-woes-could-spell-final-curtain-for-sheffield-theatre-1-4698498.

I drew attention to the Abbeydale in a blog-article some time ago because of its rare surviving iron safety-curtain, complete with 1950s advertisements for local businesses.

At that time, a Friends group were restoring it as a venue for amateur drama and other community uses:  http://www.abbeydalepicturehouse.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=81&Itemid=115.

There are some fine interior views at http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/showthread.php/53993-Abbeydale-Picture-House-Sheffield-08-09-07 and an art-photography series by Guy J Brown at http://www.guyjbrown.com/abbeydalepicturehouse.

A further article in the Star at the end of October reported that the building had been sold for £150,000.  The then unnamed buyer dismissed the possibility of running as a theatre as “not financially viable”, but said, “It’s a lovely facility.  The intention is to bring it back into public use.”

The new owner is in fact Phil Robins, who runs The Edge, an indoor climbing centre near Bramall Lane football ground.  He announced in January 2013 his intention to seek planning permission to adapt the building for climbing, bouldering and a multi-gym.  His scheme restores the interior space to its 1975 condition, and will be known as The Picture House.

Sheffield has only two listed cinemas:  the other one is the Adelphi, Attercliffe, which has been mothballed for years.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lecture Fun Palaces:  the history and architecture of the entertainment industry please click here.