Market Pavilion, Blyth, Northumberland

In the heyday of the cinema, children in the North West of England could trade clean jam jars at the box office for a part or the whole price of a ticket.  The practice was subsequently copied across Britain, and it’s remembered in the name of Tyneside’s pioneering community cinema, a charity based in a converted job centre in Whitley Bay. 

The Jam Jar Cinema was founded by Dan Ellis, then aged twenty-three, in 2013 to allow local people to see movies in a welcoming environment run by local staff and volunteers.  Dan and his founder colleagues, Stephen Fairly and William Smith, ensured that the standard of comfort was high from the outset:  most of the original seats were unused Odeon Premier seats, supplemented by sofas.

The opening night audience was nineteen people watching Gladiator.  This initial auditorium was supplemented by two more in 2019, along with a bar and lift.  The respective capacity of the three screens is 50, 29 and 38.

The whole place is welcoming – “We offer a cosy hug rather than a corporate handshake”.  Dan, who says he has the best job in the world, declares, “For me, it’s always been about creating as magical and premium an experience as possible – but also affordable,”

In 2019 Dan introduced a tiered pricing system, ‘Pay as you Please cinema’, because “We appreciate that people haven’t got as much money in their pockets as they once did.”  Customers are invited to choose a price that’s right for their situation by selecting either the standard Tier 2, currently £9.00/£9.50, or a lower Tier 1 (£7.50/£8.50), and anyone who feels able to pay more can use Tier 3 (£10.50).  No questions are asked or judgements made.

The Jam Jar Cinema received ‘Small Business of the Year’ and ‘Heart of Gold’ accolades in the 2020 Small Awards, and in 2023 Dan Ellis was awarded the British Empire Medal for services to cinema.

Northumberland County Council appointed Dan’s Jam Jar Cinema to operate the prestigious Market Pavilion in Blyth as “a vibrant and welcoming arts centre that will revitalise the community and encourage investment, developed with input from local residents”, designed by the Newcastle architects FaulknerBrowns.

The council’s aim is to draw local people to the neglected town centre by planting a social hub in the once-popular market place.  The Pavilion has three cinema screens, a 120-seat performance space called Studio 25, a bar and café.  It’s fully accessible and very comfortable, and is planned to attract 60,000 visitors to Blyth, generating £3.1 million visitor income and create 58 additional jobs.

This uncompromising and attractive building was opened in 2025 on the site of the former Central Cinema (built 1924;  closed 1961;  demolished 1974) with an extensive cultural festival of free events entitled Blyth Celebrates.  The Pavilion’s brick and glass structure is pleasant to look at and to look from, and it sits comfortably with the surrounding traditional buildings and the traditional markets held on Wednesdays, Fridays and Saturdays.

This flagship initiative didn’t come cheap, of course.  It was funded by the UK Government’s Future High Street Fund and Northumberland County Council as part of the £90 million Energising Blyth regeneration programme that’s intended to “advance Northumberland’s economic prosperity, regenerate communities, improve liveability and create a more connected and aspirational County”.

This Newcastle University Business School case study indicates that the Jam Jar magic is working in Blyth:  Case Study: Market Pavilion, Blyth | Newcastle University.

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 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.

Abraham Icek Tuschinski (1886-1942) was the founder and creator of one of the world’s finest cinemas, the Royal Tuschinski Theatre [Koninklijk Theater Tuschinski] in Amsterdam.

Tuschinski was born to Polish parents in 1886, and after he married in his late teens he decided to take his new wife, Mariem Ehrlich, to a new life away from the antisemitism of their native country.

He settled in Rotterdam and over a period of thirteen years established four cinemas in the city, each more elaborate than its predecessor.

At the end of the First World War he made a partnership with two brothers-in-law, Hermann Gerschtanowitz and Hermann Ehrlich, and bought land on Amsterdam’s Reguliersbreestraat near the Rembrandtplein square.

Construction began in June 1919 and the cinema opened on October 28th 1921.  The initial designer was Hijman Louis de Jong (1882-1944), who was dismissed before the building was completed:  the interiors were finished by Pieter den Besten (1894-1972) and Jaap Gidding (1887-1955)

Art historians variously describe the styles employed as Jugendstil (otherwise Art Nouveau) and Art Deco (though the term didn’t become current until after the 1925 exhibition Exposition internationale des arts décoratifs et industriels modernes).  A useful umbrella term is the Amsterdam School.  A practical adjective would be “exotic”.

Tuschinski wanted his patrons, when they stepped into the foyer, to feel they’d entered an illusion.  The auditorium resembled an opera house, with two balconies above the stalls.  Private spaces included a cabaret named La Gaité, a Japanese tearoom and a Moorish suite.  A modern heating and ventilation system guaranteed comfort at all seasons, and after a refurbishment in 1936 the new carpet had two-inch pile.  The building boasted the first organ in a Dutch cinema:  Wurltizer couldn’t deliver in time, and Tuschinski grabbed a second-hand alternative from a cinema in Brussels.

There is a magnificent collection of archive photographs of the theatre’s early days together with modern images by Isabel Bronts at Cinema of Dreams: The Inspiring Story of Amsterdam’s Tuschinski Theate – Cabana Magazine.

The Tuschinski Theatre cost four million guilders and quickly became celebrated.  Abraham Tuschinski was awarded Dutch citizenship in 1926, but the splendour went sour as war approached. 

When the Nazi troops invaded the Netherlands in May 1940, four of Tuschinski’s cinemas in Rotterdam were destroyed.  On Queen Wilhelmina’s birthday in August that year, British and Dutch flags appeared at a window at the Tuschniski.  Abraham Tuschinksi declined an opportunity to escape to Britain, saying that he “grew up in this country in good times [and didn’t] want to be a deserter in bad times,” he said.

The three brothers-in-law were deprived of their business, and its Jewish name was changed to Tivoli by the Nazi-supported replacement owners, Tobis Film.  Its programmes went over entirely to German films and performances by German artistes.  A fire in the summer of 1941 destroyed some of the exquisite decoration. 

Abraham Tuschinski was arrested on July 1st 1942 and sent first to Westerbork and then to Auschwitz where he was murdered on September 17th 1942.  Only three members of the Tuschinski, Ehrlich and Gerschtanowitz families were still alive at the end of the war.

This was far from the end of the story, however.  Max Gerschtanowitz took the business on after the war, and the cinema subsequently passed through successive owners until the French Pathé company acquired it as part of the MGM combine in 1995.  

Pathé carried out painstaking restorations in 1998-2002 and again in 2019-20.  Technical details of these restorations and much historical background can be found at Abraham Icek Tuschinski – Jewish Amsterdam and Pathé Tuschinski Cinema in Amsterdam | Amsterdam.info.

In 2021 King Willem-Alexander of the Netherlands granted the complex the accolade “Royal” [Koninklijk].  Two grandsons of Hermann Gerschtanowitz and his great-grandson, the actor and TV personality Winston Gerschtanowitz, and a grandson of Hermann Ehrlich attended the ceremony.