PRESS RELEASE 

September 2006

Historic Cinema Finally Saved!

(London) Following a relentless two-year struggle it finally looks like the Coronet Cinema in Eltham is now saved. The Cinema Theatre Association is pleased to announce that the Greenwich Council Planning Committee has passed an application that will give a new lease of life to the excellent Grade II listed Art Deco cinema.

Opened in 1937, the cinema was built as an Odeon by the architects Andrew Mather and Horace Ward. Andrew Mather collaborated with Harry Weedon and Thomas Braddock on the Odeon circuit’s famous black granite flagship building in Leicester Square that opened the same year. The cinema has an eye-catching white façade that can be categorized in the best tradition of British modernism and the protruding glazed stair-tower strongly resembles the Grade I listed De La Warr Pavilion in Bexhill. Amazingly the striking minimal interior has also survived and retains its original concealed lighting in the plasterwork bands across the stepped-down ceiling as well as its circular grilles. The auditorium had seating capacity of 1480 when it first opened. It only closed for cinema use in 2000.

Sadly the building has been derelict since then and has even been placed on the English Heritage register for Buildings at Risk. The new owners had originally only wanted to keep the façade and applied for permission to completely gut the inside and even remove the balcony. Everything on the interior would have been lost.

But now an application has been permitted that uses the auditorium as a children’s soft play area retaining all inside features that make this building so special. "This is really a major victory! For two years now we have been battling these unacceptable changes. Stripped of everything on its interior, the building would have been unrecognizable as a cinema. We hope that the building work will commence soon" says Richard Gray, Chair of Casework who is thrilled that the new plans will keep and even restore the cinema in its entirety.

With today’s greater interest in film it is not unrealistic to see this building reopening for cinema use again in its full glory at some point in the future. But if the principle cinema space, the auditorium, is callously destroyed this possibility will be forever ruined for future generations and an important piece of social and architectural heritage will be lost. Finding alternative reuses for historic buildings that do not do permanent damage to them is the way forward.

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