Second Lieutenant Iowerth Ap Roland Owen (1896-1917)

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Family tomb of Iorwerth ap Roland Owen (1896-1917), Anfield Cemetery, Liverpool

Walking through Liverpool’s Anfield Cemetery, I noticed a neat monument topped by a Gothic spire, commemorating the Owen family, on which one panel of the square base carries a carved portrait of their airman son Iowerth Ap Roland who was killed in action in 1917.

The magic of Google connected me with the research of Louise McTigue, who in its early days contributed to the informative blog of the funeral directors Sarsfield Memorials Liverpool:  Blog – Sarsfield Memorials LiverpoolSarsfield Memorials Liverpool | The Oldest Family Run Monumental Masons In Liverpool.

Iowerth’s father Dr Roland Owen came from Anglesey but he and his wife Margaret lived in Seaforth on the northern edge of Liverpool.

Iowerth joined the Officers’ Training Corps at his public school, Mill Hill, and though he intended to qualify in medicine at London University he put his studies on hold in 1915, joined the Inns of Court OTC and applied for a commission in the Royal Flying Corps where he was awarded his wings after six months’ training.

He immediately left for France and on the morning of May 7th 1917 he set off on a photo-reconnaissance mission from Savy airfield to Arras where he and his observer Air Mechanic Reginald Hickling were overpowered by five German planes.

It seems that Reginald Hickling was killed instantly, yet Iowerth Owen, though he was shot in the head and chest, managed to land the plane successfully before passing out.  He was bundled into an ambulance but died without regaining consciousness.  He was twenty.  He served in France for less than a month.

The two British airmen’s nemesis was a protégé of Manfred von Richthofen, the “Red Baron”. Leutnant Karl Allmenröder in a short career as a fighter pilot claimed thirty victories before he himself was shot down on June 26th 1917 aged twenty-one.  He too was a medical student.

Iowerth Owen is buried in St Catherine’s British Military Cemetery, Arras, and commemorated on his parents’ memorial in Anfield. 

Reginald Hickling, a policeman’s son who worked as a gardener, was buried at Albuera Cemetery at Bailleul-Sire-Berthoult in the Pas de Calais.  He was aged 29.  A week after his funeral his brother Frederick, a Quartermaster Sergeant in the 2/8th Worcestershire Regiment, was mentioned in dispatches.

Karl Allmenröder was buried in the Evangelical Cemetery, Wald, Germany.  His reputation as an air ace encouraged the Nazi government to name streets after him.  All these streets were renamed after 1945 and he has no public memorial.

In a time of peace these three men would have lived their lives without harming anyone.  Indeed, in their different ways they’d have made the world a better place.

Their contemporary Wilfred Owen (1893-1918) called this waste of humanity “The old Lie:  Dulce et decorum est/Pro patria mori” – “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country”.

Nottingham Playhouse

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Nottingham Playhouse

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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Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield (1977)

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

Heinz Memorial Chapel

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Heinz Memorial Chapel, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA

The Philadelphia architect Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938) demonstrated how the Gothic architectural tradition could express the dignity and function of academic architecture in his Cathedral of Learning, completed in 1937 as part of the campus of the University of Pittsburgh. 

Alongside the Cathedral in the same years he applied the same blend of historicism and modernity to design two other neo-Gothic structures for the University.

The Stephen Collins Foster Memorial (1937) provided two theatre spaces for the Department of Theatre Arts and accommodation for the Stephen Foster Memorial Museum and the Stephen Foster Collection and archive, which is regarded as particularly important because Foster’s brother Morrison Foster destroyed or dispersed many of his papers after his death.  It houses the twelve-sided Stephen Foster Shrine, which displays the composer’s sheet music and memorabilia.

Stephen Foster (1826-1864) is regarded as “the father of American music” as the composer of such minstrel songs as ‘Camptown Races’, ‘Jeanie with the Light Brown Hair’ and ‘Old Folks at Home’ (‘Swanee River’) – a mixed legacy, in which well-loved melodies are tied to lyrics that are now regarded as racially-inflected and widely disliked.

The Heinz Memorial Chapel (1938) was initially conceived by Henry John Heinz (1844-1919), the Pittsburgh-born founder of the food-processing company, as a memorial to his mother, but was extended after his death by additional bequests from his three surviving children. 

It was gifted to the University and “dedicated to culture, understanding response to beauty, and religious worship” as an interdenominational place of worship which is open to all members of the University community, employees of the H J Heinz Company and the general public.

Unlike the Cathedral of Learning, a tower which reaches 535ft into the heavens, the Heinz Memorial Chapel is a traditional cruciform church with tall, narrow proportions, many Gothic arches and pinnacles, surmounted by a fleche 256 feet above ground level.

The interior is a series of lofty French Gothic vaults, decorated with elaborate sequences of sculpture by Joseph Gattoni, and drenched in daytime by the light of predominantly blue stained glass by the prominent stained-glass artist Charles Jay Connick (1875-1945), who was responsible for the entire sequence of the chapel’s many huge windows.

The proximity of three ambitious neo-Gothic buildings in the middle of the University of Pittsburgh campus is remarkable, memorable and leaves an indelible impression, particularly on those fortunate enough to come to the city of steel and heavy industry to study.

Cathedral of Learning

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Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA
Cathedral of Learning, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA: Commons Room

The nineteenth-century Gothic Revival was influential in the USA and maintained momentum until the Second World War.

Nineteenth-century Gothic buildings were usually scholarly versions of European originals, like New York City’s Trinity Church (1846) and St Patrick’s Cathedral (1879/1888).

Subsequent neo-Gothic buildings in the States are more varied, grand and original, especially when their designs merged with the quintessentially American invention of the skyscraper.

I’ve been fortunate to enjoy the Woolworth Building (1913) and Riverside Church (1929) in New York City, Grace Cathedral (1924-64) in San Francisco and the Tribune Tower (1922-25) in Chicago, but the richest, most fascinating, downright peculiar example of American Gothic I know is the Cathedral of Learning in Pittsburgh.

This astonishing structure is a 42-storey tower containing lecture facilities, research and library areas and study and social facilities for the University of Pittsburgh. Its construction took from 1926 to 1937.

It was the brain-child of John Gabbert Bowman (1877-1962), chancellor of the university 1921-45, who envisaged a landmark building dominating the city:  “…more than a schoolhouse; it was to be a symbol of the life that Pittsburgh through the years had wanted to live”.

He commissioned Charles Zeller Klauder (1872-1938), one of the foremost American architects of his generation who continued to develop the neo-Gothic style in the age of Art Deco.

On land given by the banker and industrialist Andrew William Mellon (1855-1937), Charles Klauder created a monumental building that fulfilled all the requisite criteria – ample space for a multiplicity of purposes, a powerful impact on the Pittsburgh townscape and a rich source of imaginative art and craftsmanship.

The most awe-inspiring space in the Cathedral is the four-storey Commons [sic] Room, 52 feet high and covering half an acre of floor-space, where students are guaranteed quiet for private study.  The Perpendicular Gothic columns and vaults are functioning masonry arches, independent of the steel frame which supports the higher storeys.

The first and third floors surrounding the Commons Room are largely given over to the Nationality Rooms that John G Bowman handed over in 1926 to representatives of the nationalities that made up Pittsburgh’s diverse communities.  Each community was responsible for the entire cost of fitting out the rooms, after which the University undertook to maintain them in perpetuity.

The English Room, for example, is decorated with materials rescued from the bombed House of Commons at the end of the Second World War.  It was dedicated in 1952, and contains portraits of Andrew Mellon and William Pitt, the Prime Minster after whom the city is named.  Separate classrooms are dedicated to Wales, Scotland and Ireland.

The Turkish Room includes a large ceramic portrait of Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the founder and first president of the Republic of Turkey, instructing his people about the Turkish alphabet introduced in 1928 in place of the Arabic script.

There are currently thirty-one Nationality Rooms, from African Heritage to Yugoslavia, of which all but two are functioning classrooms.  Most of them still have blackboards, though the Korean Room, dedicated in 2015, was the first to instal an LED screen and central speaker system.

Detailed descriptions of all the Nationality Rooms can be found at Nationality Rooms – Wikipedia.

The highest level of the tower available to the public is the Federick Honors College on the 35th and 36th floors.  The views are spectacular.

The Cathedral of Learning is freely accessible to members of the public.  I ate chicken nuggets and fries in the student refectory in the basement.  You can’t always do that at British cathedrals of learning.

Sheffield’s sewer gas destructors

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Webb’s sewer gas destructor, Monckton Road, Wincobank, Sheffield

The Victorian preoccupation with sanitation was at least as significant in its time as the current concern about climate change and global warning is in the twenty-first century.

For decades I’ve been giving lectures and organising tours under the titles ‘Victorian Cemeteries’ and ‘Victorian Sewerage’ to illustrate the spectacular achievements of the Sanitary Movement but the topic is actually much wider than water supply, sewage disposal, cemeteries and crematoria.

It embraces such matters as awareness of hygiene, the development of cheap mass-produced soap, the water-closet, public lavatories and communal baths, improvements to hospitals and medical practice, vaccination, street lighting and paving, and garbage collection.  It’s a huge topic which we tend to take for granted.

I’m presenting my ‘Victorian Sewerage’ lecture to the Friends of Zion Graveyard on Monday evening, October 20th, at the Upper Wincobank Undenominational Chapel, Wincobank Avenue, Sheffield, S5 6BB, when I’ll illustrate the Grade-II listed sewer gas destructors nearby – gas lamps with a sanitary purpose.

The installation of public sewers in nineteenth-century towns and cities was a huge public benefit, but it wasn’t a perfect solution.  Tons of human ordure trickling underground to the sewage farms made their presence felt as vapours rose from the drains into the atmosphere at ground level, and methane in the sewers could in some circumstances cause explosions.

A Birmingham engineer, Joseph Edmund Webb (1862-1936), first patented his sewer gas destructor in 1892, connecting a conventional street lighting column to the sewer system rather than the town gas supply, so that sewer gas was ignited by the flame, at a temperature of around 700°F, destroying the methane and its persistent smell.

The amount of methane released sometimes failed to keep the lamp lit, until Webb’s subsequent patents provided for a back-up town-gas supply, and a system of filters and traps ensured that the flame remained lit twenty-four hours a day.

Ten local authorities had ordered destructors by 1896 and subsequently the company supplied towns and cities not only in Britain but to France, Spain, Canada, India and Singapore.

Because Sheffield’s hilly terrain meant that underground gradients could trap gas and cause dangerous concentrations of methane, the city installed eighty-four Webb destructor lamps, more apparently than any other public authority.

These unregarded public-health assets were gradually superseded by the practice of fitting ventilator stack pipes to buildings, venting the gas to the atmosphere at a sufficient height for it not to be a nuisance, and gas street-lights eventually gave place to electric lamps.

Sheffield’s Webb destructor lamps were disconnected from the gas supply in the 1960s, yet four in the Nether Edge area were restored as a heritage feature in the 1990s.

By the millennium only twenty-four survived, in various states of neglect, and twenty of them were listed Grade II and restored by a partnership of Sheffield City Council, English Heritage, Historic England and the bespoke lantern manufacturer, Pudsey Diamond Engineering Ltd.

No other British city has such a splendid collection of listed sewer lamps.

The listed lamps are once more a source of local pride as street furniture and they add to the public stock of harmless pleasure for those who wish to attempt The 6 Gas Lamps Race – Run Times or cycle past all twenty-four.

I’m grateful to Penny Rae, who invited me to speak to the Friends of Zion Graveyard, for alerting me to the two sewer lamps on the road from Shiregreen to Meadowhall which, to my shame, I’d never noticed before, though I’ve driven past them hundreds of times.

Crown & Kettle

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Crown & Kettle public house, Ancoats, Manchester

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.

Semi-detached, suburban…

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Clifton Hall, Nottingham: Pages’ Room (1987)

The village of Clifton, on the south bank of the River Trent, opposite Nottingham, was a manorial estate dating back to the eleventh century.  The family who owned it took their name from their property, and for centuries the first-born males were mostly called Gervase which can be confusing.  Some dominant figures have soubriquets, such as the apparently lovable Sir Gervase the Gentle (d1588), and his grandson Sir Gervase the Great, 1st Baronet, who hosted a visit to Clifton by King Charles I.

The family were noted for picking the wrong side in conflicts:  Sir Gervase Clifton (d1471) was beheaded after the turmoil of the Battle of Tewkesbury during the chaotic reign of King Henry VI.  Sir Gervase the Great was a Royalist, and paid fines at the end of the Civil War, yet resumed his status and influence after the Restoration.

In contrast, the ninth and last baronet, Sir Robert Clifton (1826-1869), stood as an Independent MP for Nottingham and won a succession of elections until his death.  Thirty thousand people are estimated to have turned out to witness his funeral procession, and the historian A C Wood drily remarks, “With no sense of incongruity the local papers recorded that the long procession of family mourners, tenantry and friends…was headed by two mutes immediately followed by the presidents of the Beerhouse Keepers’ Association and the Licensed Victuallers’ Association.

The inevitable march of change in the twentieth century, including the approach of council housing towards Clifton Village, led Lieutenant Colonel Peter Thomas Clifton to sell up the estate and the Hall after the Second World War.

Clifton Hall, a magnificent Grade-I listed house incorporating medieval fabric skilfully tidied in c1778-90 by John Carr of York, became a girls’ grammar school in 1958, transferred to the then Trent Polytechnic in 2002, and was sold to the property developer Chek White, who planted fourteen modern houses in a gated community “basking in views of the spectacular, historic hall”.  [Discover your dream home at Clifton Hall Drive … | Smith and Co Estates]

Clifton Hall itself was converted into two semi-detached residences which gained international fame when the property developer Anwar Rashid encountered disconcerting paranormal activity in 2007 as soon as his family moved in.  They stuck it out for eight months and evemtually moved to nearby Wollaton.

The South Wing has spectacular rooms which probably result from John Carr’s ingenious conversion of a complex existing structure. 

At the narrow east end of the house he provided a stone façade and a handsome bow running through all three storeys. 

Behind the central loggia of the entrance front, three bays are occupied by the Octagon Hall built on the site of a medieval watchtower.  It’s spectacular, but it restricted staff access between the two wings.

One of the earliest surviving features within the house is the magnificent chimneypiece in the Drawing Room (formerly the Great Chamber), ascribed to John Smythson, dated c1630 and perhaps associated with Charles I’s visit in 1631. 

Of around the same date is the exquisite little Pages’ Room, its black and white painted panelling decorated with extremely rare early seventeenth-century paintings of soldiers’ drill.

Both these features suggest that Clifton at the time of the Civil War had something of the atmosphere that can still be sensed in the Little Keep of Bolsover Castle in Derbyshire.

Clifton Hall has been completely inaccessible to the public for many years now, but the whole building is currently for sale as two lots, each apartment priced at £2.5 million, and the agents’ website is copiously illustrated.

The 9-bedroom, 6-bathroom South Wing is described and illustrated at 9 bedroom semi-detached house for sale in South Wing, Clifton Hall, NG11.  The video tour is located between slides 3 and 4.

The 6-bedroom, 5-bathroom North Wing, adapted from the nineteenth-century service quarters, is at 6 bedroom country house for sale in Holgate, Clifton Village, NG11.

Roupell Street

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Roupell Street, London SE1

When I booked a weekend in London at the Premier Inn London Southwark (Southwark Station), my London-based friend Eric prompted me to seek out the Roupell Street estate as an unexpected historic experience.

It takes only a couple of minutes to walk into a nineteenth-century time-warp of neat little terraces that are now marketed as two-bedroom houses at close on two million pounds each.

The area was developed in the early nineteenth century by the son of a jeweller, John Palmer Roupell (1771-1835), an ambitious, indeed rapacious gold-refiner and metal merchant, who bought seven acres of land in Lambeth Marsh in 1792.  The area was previously tenter grounds, used for drying new-made cloth, until John Palmer Roupell introduced iron and lead works and later, from 1824, laid out streets which were initially named after him and his wife and only son.

This was not a happy family.  The son, Richard Palmer Roupell (1782-1856), feared his father, who he knew would disapprove of his liaison with a carpenter’s daughter, Sarah Crane, with whom he had four clandestine children.  He did not marry Sarah until both his parents were dead, and subsequently had a sole legitimate son, Richard (1840-1883).

The second of the four illegitimate children, William Roupell (1831-1909), assisted his father in developing fifty-five acres of land around Streatham Hill into the Roupell Park estate.  He too was ambitious, and became MP for Lambeth in 1857 after spending £6,000 on campaigning.  This was expedited by destroying his father’s will that left his estate to sixteen-year-old Richard, and forging a substitute that made his mother sole heir and himself sole executor. 

This fraud unravelled in 1862, and though he destroyed documents and fled to Spain, he chose to return and face charges.  He repented in a confessional pamphlet, and after serving a fourteen-year sentence he went to live with his mother and sister on Brixton Hill, made himself respectable but not frugal, outlived the rest of the family and died in poverty.  Three hundred people attended when he was buried in the family vault in West Norwood Cemetery, the last of the Roupells.

Roupell Street is the sole memento of these doings, an urbane enclave that takes no notice of Waterloo East Station and the South Bank.  The elegant little cottages are built in a warm brown brick, many of them with gables that are oddly out of step with the rhythm of the front doors. 

In the middle of the grid of streets is a dignified pub, the King’s Arms, which looks as if it hasn’t changed for a century, but boasts a fine Thai kitchen.  The Londonist website [King’s Arms | Londonist] advises, “[it] might lazily be declared a ‘hidden gem’. Judging by the crowds who find the place every evening, there’s nothing very ‘hidden’ about it. Turn up of an afternoon, however, and you’ll find the perfect corner pub for a quiet pint.”  Its interior is described and evaluated at King’s Arms, London – CAMRA – The Campaign for Real Ale.

If I didn’t know Eric, who knows London, I would never have found it.

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.