Category Archives: Fun Palaces (cinemas)

Hug the Odeon

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Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

Former New Victoria Cinema, Bradford (1986)

When the New Victoria Cinema, Bradford opened in September 1930 it was the third largest cinema in the UK, seating 3,318 patrons.  Designed by the Bradford architect William Illingworth, its exterior is punctuated by two domed entrance towers.  The fan-shaped auditorium, elaborately decorated with classical pilasters and friezes, is surmounted by a 70-foot diameter dome.  There was a tea lounge, a 200-cover restaurant and a high-ceilinged ballroom with its own separate entrance.

The proscenium was 50 feet wide by 35 feet high;  the stage, 70 feet by 45 feet, was equipped with a full grid and ten dressing-rooms, because in 1930 live shows were a requirement and there was no guarantee that the fashion for new-fangled, technically unreliable talkies would last.

The original Wurlitzer survived a 1946 flood, because someone had the presence of mind to park the console at the top of its lift:  it now resides in the deliberately named New Victoria Centre, Howden-le-Wear, Co Durham.

The New Victoria became the Gaumont in 1950.  At the end of the 1950s decline set in:  the ballroom closed in 1961 and the Wurlitzer was removed when the building was subdivided in 1968.  Illingworth’s auditorium was so vast that, instead of the usual practice of dropping a wall from the balcony end to create additional screens in the rear stalls, the balcony itself was divided into two screens by a vertical partition and a floor across to the proscenium, and the stalls area became a 1,000-seater Mecca bingo hall. The twinned cinema reopened as the Odeon in August 1969.  In 1988 a third screen was opened within the otherwise unused ballroom.

After the bingo-club closed in 1997 and the multiplex cinema followed in 2000 the building stood empty.  It was sold first to a developer and later to Yorkshire Forward:  both planned to demolish the Odeon completely, and repeated redevelopment schemes excited vociferous opposition led by the Bradford Odeon Rescue Group [BORG], who in 2007 arranged for a thousand people to link hands and hug the entire building.

Public-sector bodies such as Yorkshire Forward and Bradford Centre Regeneration [BCR] claimed that the building had no historical value and was deteriorating, which it might well be after a decade without active maintenance.  English Heritage remained unconvinced that it is worth listing, and interested groups such as the Twentieth Century Society and the Cinema Theatre Association had difficulty gaining access to prove otherwise.

In the end, it fell to urban explorers, those curious obsessive aficionados of dereliction, to provide incontrovertible evidence that the original decorative scheme remained.  The 1968-9 conversion proved to be a shell built within the original space, and the ballroom conversion simply involved installing a suspended ceiling;  Odeon Cinema, Bradford – Whatevers Left.

To see some of what remains, check –
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tTZ6cmoURRU&feature=related.  It’s an eye-opener.

There’s a detailed history of the New Victoria Cinema at http://www.bradfordtimeline.co.uk/newvic.htm.  The present owners of the New Victoria Wurlitzer are at http://www.netoa.org.uk.

In September 2012 the agreement with the developer who intended to demolish it fell through, prompting a fresh search for an economic solution:  http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/9941717._All_viable_options_open__after_Odeon_deal_collapses and http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-leeds-20097997.

The Homes & Communities Agency, to which the building had devolved, proposed to sell it to Bradford City Council for £1, and to provide £4.1 million to secure the building.  A structural survey revealed that, after all, the building was in better condition than had previously been suggested.

Irna Qureshi’s article in The Guardian (September 21st 2012) surveys the fall and rise of the New Victoria Cinema’s fortunes:  http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/the-northerner/2012/sep/21/bradford-georgegalloway.

A 2014 film by Mark Nicholson and Vicky Leith shows how the building revealed itself as the 1970s accretions were stripped away:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0Eidel-etU.

An urban-explorer report, presumably dating from early 2017, shows the extent of the cavernous spaces inside the New Victoria waiting to be restored: http://www.thetelegraphandargus.co.uk/news/15377618.23_PICTURES_____Urban_explorer____photographer_gets_a_rare_glimpse_inside_Bradford_s_Odeon_building/#gallery0.

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

Madeleine moment

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

My Isle of Man host-with-the-most John has provided further details of the Wurlitzer organ at Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire, which, as I mentioned in the previous blog, was bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris in 1937 for Sir Julien Cahn’s private theatre attached to his house.

The organ came, not from the Madeleine Theatre (1924), which still exists in the Rue de Surene [http://www.theatremadeleine.com/index-historique.html], but from another Madeleine Theatre, which is now an opticians, designed entirely as a cinema by Marcel Oudin in 1918, at 14 Boulevard de la Madeleine .  The Wurlitzer – one of only two French Wurlitzers – was installed by the then owners, Loew Inc, in 1926.  According to Ken Roe’s contribution to http://cinematreasures.org/theater/23874/ the cinema subsequently became the Gaumont Madeleine and showed films until at least the mid-1970s.

The website http://www.theatreorgans.com indicates this Wurlitzer was repossessed at some point after installation.  This modest instrument was an ideal purchase for Sir Julien’s 352-seat theatre – “une salle élégante“, as the French account has it.

The knobs and bells and whistles of the Wurlitzer have a more elegant tone when described in French:  les clochettes de traîneau [sleigh bells], les sabots de cheval [horses’ hooves], les vagues [waves], les oiseaux [birdsong], la corne d’auto [car hooter], le gong d’incendie [fire-alarm], le sifflet de bateau à vapeur [steamboat whistle], la sirène [siren], le tam-tam [gong], et la sonnerie de porte [doorbell].

Among his many talents, John is a church organist and confessed, many years ago, to an ambition to play a Wurlitzer like the Blackpool Tower Ballroom.  My influence in Blackpool runs nowhere near that far, but I managed to give him the opportunity to play the Stanford Hall Wurlitzer.

Sometime in the late 1980s I ran a WEA day-visit to country houses in south Nottinghamshire, and smuggled John into the orchestra pit of the Stanford Hall Theatre – then part of the Co-operative College – with an arrangement that when at the end of my tour I brought the group into the back of the auditorium and said, “And this is the private theatre…” John would press the lift-button on the console and rise from the pit playing ‘I do like to be beside the seaside’.

Which would have worked perfectly if John had realised how far up the lift goes, or I’d been aware that he suffers from vertigo.  It’s quite difficult to keep a grip when you’re playing with both hands and both feet.  I suppose buttock-clenching is the only resort and I’ve never liked to ask.

Certainly John’s performance had a certain bravura quality, and we’ve both dined out on the story ever since.

 

Security-minded millionaire

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Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Theatre, Stanford Hall, Nottinghamshire

Sir Julien Cahn (1882-1944), the millionaire owner of the Nottingham Furnishing Company, lived from 1928 until his death at Stanford Hall, near Loughborough, which he transformed to suit his distinctive lifestyle – part English country house, part Hollywood.

He employed Queen Mary’s decorator, White, Allom Ltd, to install pastiche historical interiors and modern Art Deco schemes including at least four bathrooms (Sir Julien’s in black and white, Lady Cahn’s in blue and white, a guest bathroom in tortoiseshell and another – which survives – in salmon pink marble).  He built an indoor badminton court with trellis-work, trompe l’oeil privet and a birdcage in the corner.

Apart from hunting and philanthropy Sir Julien had two major hobbies, cricket and magic, in neither of which – according to contemporary accounts – he particularly excelled, but both of which he took extremely seriously.

To provide a venue for charity performances, Sir Julien commissioned a sumptuous 352-seat private theatre with a Wurlitzer organ bought second-hand from the Madeleine Theatre in Paris.  Above the auditorium Sir Julien provided a wing of bedrooms for the visiting cricket stars who took part in the Sir Julien Cahn Cricket XI.

Below the auditorium is the most extraordinary feature of all – a capacious gas-proof air-raid shelter easily capable of accommodating the entire household, with decontamination facilities and an escape-tunnel extending thirty-six feet beyond the building line in case the entire building collapsed above.

The Cahns left their mark in the grounds too.  There was an open-air swimming-pool, which eventually cost £60,000, nearly as much as the theatre, and for his fifty-fifth birthday Lady Cahn bought her husband some sea-lions (their names were Charlie, Aqua, Freda and Ivy) and a suitable pool was duly constructed.

After Sir Julien’s death in 1944 Stanford Hall became the Co-operative College until 2001.