a timber yard, was quickly enlarged. Its manager Arthur Vallance dressed in top hat and tails on Saturday nights to greet his patrons. Audiences in some of these early affairs suffered spartan conditions, sitting on wooden benches and looking up to exposed roof beams in the auditorium. Wood Street’s two cinemas were like this; the Crown had a leaky roof and the Arcadia’s screen at one point was in the middle, patrons paying half price to sit behind it and watch films back to front. St James Electric Picture Palace had similarities with the fictional cinema featured in The Smallest Show on Earth: its projector trembled as trains called at St James Street station above, drowning out an old gent playing a violin and a pianist accompanying films from a small balcony. Both were target practice for small boys with catapults. During the First World War it gave free entry to injured soldiers.
…the Arcadia’s screen at one point was in the middle, patrons paying half price to sit behind it and watch films back to front. 1913. By the start of the First World War, twenty one cinemas had opened in the boroughs of Leyton and Walthamstow, providing a temporary escape from reality in this rapidly urbanised part of Essex. Success however was not guaranteed. The Walthamstow Grand Central proposed for Erskine Road never materialised and several cinemas closed during the interwar period. The Carlton, which replaced cottages on Walthamstow High Street, fared much better. A local independent enterprise, it stood serenely yet diminutively opposite
the towering Palace Theatre. The architect was J. Williams Dunsford, also responsible for Walthamstow Central Library and one of the directors was Highams Park hardware merchant, Amos Oakden. In 1925 the Carlton’s orchestra was sacked and an organ was installed but wasn’t played at full volume for fear parts of the auditorium plasterwork would fall off. It was made by Roy Huntingford, former apprentice at R. Spurden Rutt in Leyton who supplied church organs around the world. The Regal, Highams Park had a ‘Rutt’ which now lives at the St Albans Organ Theatre.
Photos © Vestry House Museum, London Borough of Waltham Forest
Local builders constructed some early venues and in the case of Good Brothers, operated them too. They built the Queen’s cinema in 1911 on the yard behind their builders merchants showrooms on Hoe Street, followed by the Empire on an undeveloped plot at Bell Corner and the Empress (soon renamed the Scala) near the Bakers Arms. The venues promoted their handy work, featuring classical columns and ornate decorative plasterwork. A local cinema chain was born. Films were commonly rushed between screenings from one venue to the next. One projectionist leaving the Scala took a tram to Bell Corner, and stumbling off dropped the film for the Empire’s next performance into the wet road outside. Both cinemas appeared in joint press adverts for films such as The Battle of The Somme, released in 1916, and watched in Britain by about twenty million people in its first six weeks alone. It was made by British & Colonial, whose studios were a converted roller skating rink on Hoe Street also built by Good Brothers. Another roller skating arena - next to Bearman’s department store in Leytonstone - was converted into the Rink cinema in 1911 (later under Sidney Bernstein it became the Rialto, redesigned by Cecil Massey and Theodore Komisarjevksy who worked with Bernstein on Walthamstow’s Granada soon after). Nearby on Church Lane, a GPO sorting office was converted into the Gaiety in
Gaiety Cinema, Church Lane, Leytonstone c1920
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