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

Smedley’s

1 Reply
County Hall (formerly Smedley's Hydro), Matlock, Derbyshire

County Hall (formerly Smedley’s Hydro), Matlock, Derbyshire

Matlock owes its importance as the county town of Derbyshire primarily to two men.

The first, John Smedley (1803-1874), was a local hosiery manufacturer who made a recovery from typhus at the age of forty-three at the newly-opened Ben Rhydding Hydro near Ilkley.  He felt he owed his life to an innovative form of water-cure, hydropathy, a system of baths, compresses and treatments in mineral-free water to expel morbid impurities from the body through “putrescent excrescences”.

He underwent a religious conversion which led him to encourage temperance through the promotion of hydropathic “cures”, which he promoted as an “entirely an original system, not the cold water cure”.

In 1853 he bought a small private medical establishment serving six patients and developed it into the huge Smedley’s Hydro on Matlock Bank.

After his death the business was incorporated as Smedley’s Hydropathic Company Limited, with capital of £25,000.  The buildings were repeatedly extended until by the Edwardian period Smedley’s had 300 bedrooms.

The opulent architecture of Smedley’s Hydro reflects the gradual relaxation of its founder’s strict temperance regime:  tobacco, cards, billiards and dancing were introduced over the years, and the iron-and-glass Winter Garden of 1900 was built with a dance-floor.

What John Smedley had intended as a therapeutic establishment open to all classes gradually became a high-class hotel for those who could afford it:  eventually there was actually a licensed bar on the premises.

The comfort and luxury of Smedley’s in the early twentieth-century was a long way from its founder’s precepts banning “books, newspapers, or tracts of an irreligious character”, visitors or receiving letters on the Sabbath.

The entire building was commandeered at the start of World War II and used as the Military School of Intelligence.  Business resumed in 1947, but failed to pick up, and Smedley’s Hydro closed in 1955.

At that point the second “father” of modern Matlock stepped in – Alderman Charles White (1891 -1956), the chairman of Derbyshire County Council, who spotted the opportunity to move the council’s offices from cramped sites in the centre of Derby to a huge empty building nearer the geographical centre of the county.

Smedley’s became County Offices, and in the 1990s was aggrandised as County Hall.  There is a species of rush hour up the bank and across the moors twice a day as hosts of civil servants flit in and out of the town.

Its position as the county town is no doubt the reason why Matlock retained its rail service as a branch-line when the main line to Manchester closed in 1968.  Perhaps it’s also the reason it has a Sainsbury’s.

There’s a particularly well-constructed website of Matlock and Matlock Bath history at http://www.andrewsgen.com/matlock/index.htm.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Biker’s spa

1 Reply
Royal Well, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

Royal Well, Matlock Bath, Derbyshire

Driving through the limestone gorge along the A6 through Matlock Bath always has a feeling of being on holiday.

The place has in fact been a resort since the end of the seventeenth century, when a mineral spring on the hillside was developed for the growing fashion for cold-bathing that had already fostered the growth of new spas such as Harrogate, Scarborough and Tunbridge Wells.

This spring still feeds into a grotto at the back of a public car-park that occupies the site of the Old Bath Hotel, latterly the Royal Hotel, which burnt down in 1929.

The New Bath Hotel of 1762-7 remains a hotel where the basement bathing pool is supplied with tepid thermal water from the original spring.  It suddenly closed in July 2012, but is now back in business:  Hotel in Matlock Bath, Peak District Derbyshire – New Bath Hotel (newbathhotelandspa.com).

Further along the valley, the Temple Hotel [The Temple | The Temple in Matlock Bath (holidaycottages.co.uk)] was built in 1786 alongside the Fountain Baths, which had opened eight years previously.

A fourth hotel, known simply as the Hotel or Great Hotel, proved overambitious, and was subdivided in the 1790s into a terrace which became Museum Parade, so named after Mawe’s Old Museum which took over the enormous dining-room.

In days gone by, the appeal of Matlock Bath was that it wasn’t Buxton.  Though Buxton was anything but grand until the 5th Duke of Devonshire tried to turn it into Bath in the late eighteenth century [see Mary, Queen of Scots slept here, Buxton’s Crescent and Duke’s Dome], Matlock Bath, in a dark gorge with hardly any road access, was much more secluded.

Phyllis Hembry, the historian of British spas, described the late eighteenth-century lifestyle:  “…the company…had their meals at 1s each in common ‘in a very sociable manner’;  they dined at 2 pm and had supper at 8 pm and were free to drink as they pleased.  The evening concluded with dancing or card-playing.  Visitors inclined to exercise could take the ferry near the Old Bath, rowed by Walker the boatman, to the other river bank where he had made a Lovers’ Walk.”

Indeed, Dr Hembry relates, when the teenage 5th Duke of Rutland turned up with some friends at the end of the season in 1796 he had the place to himself.

Nowadays the main road runs through the dale, and at weekends it’s the resort of bikers, whose gleaming machines are lined up outside the cafés and chip-shops.  The black leather gear may look intimidating, but you may be sure the people inside are respectable.

Indeed, when my mate Richard bid at a fantasy auction for a ride on a Harley Davison, he found himself whisked off to Matlock Bath for a greasy-spoon breakfast by a hospital consultant.

Priceless.

There’s a particularly well-constructed website of Matlock and Matlock Bath history at http://www.andrewsgen.com/matlock/index.htm.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Derbyshire-based Taking the Waters:  the history of spas & hydros tour, with text, photographs and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Midland Hotel, Morecambe

Leave a Reply
Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

Midland Hotel, Morecambe, Lancashire

The Midland Hotel, Morecambe (1933) – an unlikely building in an unlikely setting – is one of the finest examples of Streamline Moderne (late Art Deco) architecture in Britain.  Its heyday lasted barely six years, until the outbreak of war.  After that, it became progressively difficult to operate, until it was rescued, sumptuously renovated and reopened in June 2008 by the developer Urban Splash.

Its railway-owned predecessor dated back to 1848, to the very beginnings of the resort that became Morecambe, and the Promenade Station was constructed in 1907 specifically to bring trains as close as possible to the hotel’s front door.

By the early 1930s the old hotel was badly out of date, and in January 1932 the directors of the London Midland & Scottish Railway approved plans to replace the 1848 building with “a building of international quality in the modern style”, designed by Oliver Hill (1887-1968) on a budget of slightly less than £72,000.  The new building rose from the lawn of the old hotel, which was subsequently demolished.

Oliver Hill was at the height of his career in the 1930s:  after starting out designing picturesque Arts & Crafts cottages, he embraced the visual potential of the Moderne style, of which his best designs, in addition to the Morecambe Midland Hotel, are the partially-built Frinton Park Estate in Essex (1934-6) and the house Landfall (1938), near Poole in Dorset.

His attributes were an eye for unifying architecture with decoration, and his adventurous use of materials such as concrete, chrome and vitrolite [Pigmented structural glass – Wikipedia].  The result was a building that, in the words of the Architectural Review, “rises from the sea like a great white ship, gracefully curved”.

Hill’s brief for the Midland Hotel enabled him to recruit the best available decorative artists while maintaining full control of the building’s aesthetic programme.

The sculptor and designer Eric Gill (1882-1940) designed and carved for the façade two Portland stone seahorses in the form of the celebrated Morecambe Bay shrimps, a ten-foot Neptune and Triton medallion above the central staircase, a bas-relief, Odysseus welcomed from the sea by Nausicaa, and a map of North West England, painted in oil by his son-in-law Denis Tegetmeier.

In the circular café were originally murals by Eric Ravilious (1903-1942) of the seaside by day and by night.  These quickly deteriorated, and one mural was reconstructed by London Weekend Television set-designers for the TV series Agatha Christie’s Poirot in 1989.

The floor of the entrance hall was embellished with a mosaic seahorse and circular, wave-patterned hand-knotted rugs by Marion Dorn (1896-1964), who also worked on the Berkeley, Claridges and Savoy Hotels in London and the Cunard liner Queen Mary.

The new hotel opened on Wednesday July 12th 1933, and quickly attracted celebrities in search of luxury and privacy within easy reach of London, performers from the Winter Gardens and other theatres, and Yorkshire businessmen who commuted by railway club carriage to Leeds or Bradford through the summer months.

It’s interesting that the LMS Railway thought it worthwhile to cater for the most affluent members of British society in the north of England.  After the war and nationalisation the British Transport Commission could hardly get rid of it fast enough.

There are images of the Midland Hotel as it stood before Urban Splash took it on at http://www.abandoned-britain.com/PP/midlandhotel/1.htm.

The Midland Hotel is now operated by English Lakes:  http://englishlakes.co.uk/hotels/lancashire-hotels/the-midland-hotel-morecambe.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Morecambe Winter Gardens

Leave a Reply
Winter Gardens, Morecambe, Lancashire

Winter Gardens, Morecambe, Lancashire

What is now called Morecambe Winter Gardens isn’t in fact the Winter Gardens at all.  It’s the Victoria Pavilion, built in 1897 alongside the Winter Gardens and Empress Ballroom of 1878.

The original complex began as the People’s Palace, built for the Morecambe Bath & Winter Gardens Company to provide entertainment, baths and an aquarium, on the lines of the Scarborough People’s Palace & Aquarium (1875-7) and the Great Yarmouth Aquarium (1876).

The Victoria Pavilion was designed by the Manchester-based practice Mangnall & Littlewoods which had already designed the Morecambe West End Pier and Pavilion in 1895-6, and were then working on the Central Pier Pavilion and the Hotel Metropole at the same time as the Victoria Pavilion.

The Winter Gardens closed in 1977, and the adjacent Ballroom was demolished in 1982 on the specious grounds that the replacement development would finance restoration of the Pavilion.

In fact it didn’t:  the Friends of the Winter Gardens were formed in 1986 and its current owners are the Morecambe Winter Gardens Preservation Trust Ltd [http://www.thewintergardensmorecambe.co.uk/home], established in 2006 to take on the huge task of making the theatre fit to earn its own living once more.

It’s a magnificent building, inside and out, listed Grade II*, and one of the few remaining Victorian structures in a resort that has not stood the test of time.

The Theatres Trust identifies it as “a rare type, probably now unique” – a large-scale concert-party auditorium, very broad in relation to the width of the proscenium and the size of the stage.

It was used as a location for the Laurence Olivier film The Entertainer in 1959.

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

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £15.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  Please send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

The resort that never was

1 Reply
Ravenscar, North Yorkshire

Ravenscar, North Yorkshire

Ravenscar is the highest point on the Yorkshire coast between Scarborough and Whitby.  Until the end of the nineteenth century it was simply called Peak.

Peak House, latterly Raven Hall, was built in 1773 by the owner of the local alum works, Captain William Childs.  He bequeathed it to his daughter Ann, widow of the Dr Francis Willis (1718-1807) who treated King George III in his apparent insanity.  Their son, Rev Dr Richard Willis, was a notorious gambler and a reputed smuggler.  There is an enjoyable tale of the estate being lost on a bet over two lice crossing a saucer:  in fact, it was mortgaged by Mr William Henry Hammond, who foreclosed and took over the property in 1845.

W H Hammond went to inordinate lengths to sponsor a railway link between Scarborough and Whitby, though he died in 1884, three months before the line opened.

The railway was absurd:  gradients of 1 in 39 and 1 in 41 meant that locomotives often stalled and had to take a run at the summit.  Hammond insisted that the track ran through his estate in a practically unnecessary tunnel.  Passenger trains from Scarborough to Whitby had to reverse to enter both termini.

In 1890 Hammond’s daughters sold the estate to the Peak Estate Company for £10,000, and by 1895 the house was extended and converted into a hotel “replete with every modern convenience”, and the surrounding land was laid out as a holiday resort of 1,500 building plots with roads and mains drainage and a public water-supply.

The North Eastern Railway was persuaded to rename the station “Ravenscar” in 1897 and to provide a passing loop and second platform.  Regular land-sales were held from 1896 onwards, for which free lunches and special trains from the West Riding towns were provided.

In fact, barely a dozen houses were ever built.  One sad boarding house, clearly intended as part of a terrace, stands in the fields that would have been the Marine Esplanade.  On one occasion the station waiting-room blew away in a storm.

The Ravenscar Estate Company apparently went into liquidation in 1913, but sales were continued until after the Great War.  Building a seaside resort seven hundred feet above sea level was perhaps not a good idea.

Still, from time to time, hopeful descendants of the original purchasers appear at Ravenscar clutching deeds they have found among family papers:  their reactions on seeing their inheritances are, by all accounts, uniform and entirely understandable.

The railway, which closed in 1965, now forms part of the Cleveland Way trail:  http://www.nationaltrail.co.uk/ClevelandWay/index.asp?PageId=1.  Ravenscar is also the terminus of the celebrated Lyke Wake Walk:  see http://www.lykewake.org.

However you get there, don’t miss tea at the Raven Hall Hotel [http://www.ravenhall.co.uk] with a log fire and the view across to Robin Hood’s Bay.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 72-page, A4 handbook for the 2015 Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

End of the line: Fleetwood

Leave a Reply

North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood, Lancashire

North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood, Lancashire

We purposely located the 2012 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour at the North Euston Hotel, Fleetwood [http://www.northeustonhotel.com],– not only for its comfort and quietness but because it’s significant in the history of the Lancashire coast.

Its name indicates that it was once the northern terminus of the railway from London’s Euston Station, at a time when George Stephenson proclaimed that no locomotive would ever manage the climb over Shap to the Scottish border.

The town of Fleetwood was planned and named by Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood (1801-1866) as the transhipment point between the Preston & Wyre Railway, which opened in 1840, and the steamer service to Ardrossan which was connected by rail to Glasgow.

This worked fairly well until what we now call the West Coast Main Line opened over Shap in 1847.  By that time Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood had gone bankrupt, and though Fleetwood harbour in time served other purposes, its railway remained forever on a branch line from Preston.

The grandly curving hotel was designed by Decimus Burton as part of Fleetwood’s intended holiday resort.

The hotel’s first manager, a Corsican called Zenon Vantini, was responsible for the first railway-station refreshment-room, at Wolverton, and ran the Euston and Victoria Hotels in London.

Opened in 1841, it was eventually bought by the War Department as a School of Musketry for Officers, and reopened in 1861 as the Euston Barracks.

Vantini took a lead, in conjunction with the first vicar of Fleetwood, Rev Canon St Vincent Beechey (son of the painter William Beechey), in founding the Northern Church of England School in 1844.

This school later took the name Rossall School [http://www.rossall.co.uk] after it leased and then bought the Rossall Hall estate from Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood.

Sir Peter Hesketh Fleetwood died in such poverty that his estate could not pay for his funeral.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Savoy tales

Leave a Reply

Savoy Hotel, London

Savoy Hotel, London

My 1960s grammar-school education was enlivened by the headmaster’s obsession with the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan, which provided our only experience of practical drama.  Shakespeare was for classroom study;  any play written after 1900 was to be seen in the professional theatre.

I didn’t understand for years why the G&S canon is referred to as the “Savoy operas”.

The reason, of course, is that the promoter of these odd survivals of Victorian show-business was Richard D’Oyly Carte (1844-1901), who used the capital he accumulated from the first collaborations of William Schwenck Gilbert (1836-1911) and Arthur Sullivan (1842-1900) to build a brand-new theatre on the land between the Strand and the Thames Embankment, ground which had been the site of the medieval Savoy Palace, of which the chapel still survives.

He named his new venue the Savoy Theatre.  When it opened in 1881 it was the first building in the world to be entirely lit by electricity, though limited generating capacity meant that the stage itself was lit by gas for the first couple of months.

D’Oyly Carte’s other theatrical innovations included free programmes, queues, numbered tickets and tea at the interval.

The Savoy Theatre was built on the profits of Trial by Jury, HMS Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and Patience, which transferred from the Opera Comique to open the Savoy Theatre.  Gilbert & Sullivan’s first work for the new theatre was Iolanthe.

It seems that the profits of The Mikado provided the capital for D’Oyly Carte to build the Savoy Hotel (1889), which boasted no less than 67 bathrooms, “ascending rooms” between each floor and “speaking tubes” communicating between floors.

When the hotel was enlarged in 1903 its main entrance transferred to the Strand, and the theatre-foyer was moved to the hotel courtyard, so that the audience enters at a level higher than the top of the proscenium arch, descending to their seats by stairs and corridors which are partly beneath the roadway of Savoy Court, the only roadway in Britain where vehicles drive on the right.

Rupert D’Oyly Carte, Richard’s son, had the entire theatre remodelled in 1929 in an uncompromisingly modern manner by Frank A Tugwell and Basil Ionides – a splendid confection of silver and gold, autumnal fabrics and concealed lighting.

This was the venue for the 1941 première of Noël Coward’s Blithe Spirit.

During a renovation in 1990 a fire destroyed the entire auditorium.  The terms of the theatre’s insurance required that Tugwell and Ionides’ design should be meticulously reinstated, and so it reopened in 1993.  The architect, Sir William Whitfield, added a further storey, so that now the 56-ft stage-tower is surmounted by plant rooms and a leisure-centre with a swimming pool.

The hotel was closed in 2007 for a comprehensive renovation that took until 2010.

The stories and the personalities attached to the theatre and the hotel are endless.  My own favourite is of the actor, Richard Harris (1930-2002), a long-time resident, who was carried out of the hotel foyer on a stretcher on his way to his hospital death-bed, shouting to passers-by, “It was the food!”

There is a comprehensive history of the theatre in Kevin Chapple et al, Reflected Light:  the story of the Savoy Theatre (Dewynters 1993).

To see what’s on at the Savoy Theatre, go to http://www.savoytheatre.org.  The Savoy Hotel website is http://www.fairmont.com/savoy.

 

Excuse for a sneck-lifter

Leave a Reply

The Blue Bell, 53 Fossgate, York

The Blue Bell, 53 Fossgate, York

When my mate Richard and I have a day out together there’s always a problem period around late afternoon, when we struggle to find something to do.  The shops and tourist places start to close down, and it’s too early to dine in style.

In York recently we sandwiched the National Railway Museum between coffee, lunch and afternoon tea, and then spent an hour in the small but enriching York Art Gallery [http://www.yorkartgallery.org.uk/Page/Index.aspx].

Thanks to the Good Beer Guide [http://www.camra.org.uk/gbg] we came upon the Blue Bell, 53 Fossgate – easily missed, and unmissable.

It’s an utterly unremarkable-looking place until you step inside.  It has a bar and a smoke-room, neither big enough to swing a cat in, board-panelled from floor to ceiling.  There’s a real fire and a splendid choice of beers.  The old cliché about stepping into someone’s front room is entirely apt at the Blue Bell.

It seems odd that the Blue Bell is listed II*, until you read the English Heritage list description:  http://list.english-heritage.org.uk/resultsingle.aspx?uid=1257825.

Like many buildings in the streets of central York, the Blue Bell and no 54 next door have a timbered core, here dating back to the middle of the seventeenth century.  The jettied timber fronts were cut back and refaced sometime in the late eighteenth century.

At the end of the nineteenth century, when no 53 became the Blue Bell, an embossed front window was installed.  Since then, very little is changed:  the list description, without specifying a date, describes it as “the last C19 pub interior in York to survive intact”.

This is probably because it was continuously owned by the same family for almost a century until 1993.

Like the more famous “Nellie’s”, the White Horse Inn in Beverley, East Yorkshire, the Blue Bell has survived all the vicissitudes of the licensed trade through the twentieth century, so that it’s now a tiny treasure, an unlikely jewel in the crown of the historic heart of York.

And it’s a particularly good place for what in Yorkshire we call a “sneck-lifter”.  “Sneck” is the latch of a door or gate.  When you lift the sneck, literally, it lets you into warmth and hospitality.  When you sip your first pint (and your second), you’re ready to enjoy the next few hours.

Update:  Evidence that a quiet night is virtually guaranteed in the Blue Bell is to be found in this article in the Daily Mail (March 22nd 2013):  http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2297549/The-Blue-Bell-York-axed-national-beer-guide-discriminates-non-regulars.html.

The 44-page, A4 handbook for the 2009 Historic York tour, with text, photographs, and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £7.50 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here. To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

New Blackpool trams

1 Reply

Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

Starr Gate Terminus, Blackpool (June 2012)

The new Blackpool trams began operating on April 4th 2012 – sleek, smooth articulated LRTs in a funky purple-and-white colour scheme.

It’s a superb service, all the way from Starr Gate to Fleetwood and back with space, comfort and ease.  It cost £100 million.

The demise of the old fleet is regretted by some, but it really was past its sell-by date.  Some trams dated back to the 1930s, and many had been rebuilt and patched like the hammer with three new handles and two new heads: [see Essentially Victorian Blackpool and Tram terminus].

The beauty of the promenade tramway, and the reason it survived, is its ability to shift holiday crowds, most of all at the illuminations.  Blackpool trams have always been much bigger than buses, and they take up less road space because they mostly run on their own private tracks.

And the new ones, like the old ones, appear to be crewed by committees.

And if you want a nostalgia trip, you can pay buy a day-saver to use the heritage fleet, when it’s running:  Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours – Blackpool Heritage Tram Tours.

For details of Mike Higginbottom’s lectures on seaside architecture, Away from it all:  the heritage of holiday resorts, Beside the Seaside:  the architecture of British coastal resorts, Blackpool’s Seaside Heritage and Yorkshire’s Seaside Heritage, please click here.

The 80-page, A4 handbook for the 2013 Lancashire’s Seaside Heritage tour, with text, photographs, maps and a reading list, is available for purchase, price £10.00 including postage and packing.  To view sample pages click here.  To order a copy, please click here or, if you prefer, send a cheque, payable to Mike Higginbottom, to 63 Vivian Road, Sheffield, S5 6WJ.

Curtains at the Abbeydale

Leave a Reply

Former Abbeydale Cinema, Sheffield (1984)

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.