London Cinemas
With the arrival of sound the cinema took its place as the premier worldwide entertainment. Around the globe movie houses blossomed to feed public demand, and Art Deco, in its various manifestations, was often the "modern" look chosen for their exteriors, and sometimes for their interiors too.
These palaces of make-believe soon served as the local meeting place, and the Odeon, Granada, ABC, Regal and other cinema chains, some with startling new façades, or modern versions of ancient ones, were a welcome place to escape into for friends, family and paramours.
The Leicester Square Odeon
The Leicester Square Odeon cinema was planned as the flagship
of the Odeon chain. It was built on a lot that had previously been occupied
by the Alhambra Music Hall. The chief architects were Harry Weedon and Andrew
Mather. They decided to depart from the Odeon scheme of curves and cream coloured
tiles (seen below here in Woolwich and Muswell Hill) in favour of the hard lines
of a more severe, rectilinear German style. A square tower, clad in shiny, black
granite reaching up 120 feet to a flat cap, carries the Odeon name. This is
lit at night by lines of neon that turn it into a beacon for moviegoers.
Unfortunately the Art Deco interior has gone. The original auditorium was a wonder of Art Deco splendour, with radiating lines and graceful female figures leaping in a flowing dance movement that radiated out from them in curved lines.
The Muswell Hill Odeon
A somewhat toned down modernism was provided by George Coles’ for his 1936 Muswell Hill Odeon on Fortis Green Road. It was built in close proximity to a church, and to accommodate for this the exterior is less showy than, say the cinemas in Leicester Square. It has a gently curved façade covered with glazed cream tiles. This is one of the very few working London Deco cinemas that still possess its original interior intact.
Muswell Hill Odeon interior
This is not the most recent painting of this amazing interior, but this particular version gives a good look at the separation of the streamlined machine look that it presents.
The Woolwich Odeon
One of Odeon's most famous architects was George Coles, who devised the modernistic look seen here. On Powis Steet in Woolwich, this 1937 Odeon has a sleek racing exterior, suggesting a streamlined car from the same epoch, like the famous Cord roadster. The bulk of the extensive auditorium was blended into the rest of the building with cream coloured faience tiles. Tall beacons with an Egyptian flavour cast back to Coles’ earlier historical styles.
The Finchley Road Odeon
Harry Weedon was responsible for the Finchley Road Odeon, 1937. Though lacking quite the exotic streamlined curves, or cream-coloured tiles of Coles’ creations, it has a strong, majestic brick exterior that suggests an ancient temple or mausoleum.
The Himalaya Palace
The recently restored Himalaya Palace in Southall, designed by George Coles and completed in 1929, was originally the Palace cinema. Coles had his assistant Arthur Roberts research Chinese architecture in the British Museum, and the resulting cinema came complete with upturned roof-tiles, and dragons gaping from the roof-ends. Utterly unique in the UK, it had been recently used as a shopping mall, but was gutted by a fire in 1998. This might have been the end, but the owner amazingly came forward with a wish to transform it back into the cinema he recalled from his youth. With considerable aid and assistance from English Heritage, the bright polychrome of the original colour scheme was painstakingly restored, and it reopened in 2001, where it perhaps appropriately shows mostly Bollywood films.
Himalaya Palace detail
The Tooting Granada
The "flagship" of the Granada chain was built in the south London suburb of Tooting, at 50-60 Mitcham Road, and opened in 1931. Interior designer Theodore Komisarjevsky created an astonishing neo-Gothic interior for the Tooting Broadway Granada. The architect was Cecil Masey, who gave it a stately Italianate façade that bodes no indication of the flamboyant splendour that lay inside. Widely regarded as one of the UK’s, greatest theatre interiors, this captivating interior is intact, and was listed in 1972, one of the first Art Deco cinemas to achieve this recognition. Currently it is Grade I listed, and while this certainly preserves the building, like many former Granada cinemas the Tooting Granada is alive today and accessible to the public as a bingo hall.
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