After the sudden closure in 2023 of the Empire, Sunderland city centre was left without a single cinema.
Reporter Tony Gillan guides us through a lost era when Wearside was teeming with picture houses.
Reporter Tony Gillan guides us through a lost era when Wearside was teeming with picture houses.
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00:00 This is, or rather was, the Empire Cinema in Lambton Street in the centre of Sunderland.
00:08 It's one of Sunderland's more recently built cinemas having first opened its doors in 2004.
00:13 It also holds the sad distinction, at the time of recording, of being the final remaining
00:17 cinema in Sunderland city centre before it abruptly closed down in July of 2023.
00:25 As things stand currently, the nearest cinemas Sunderland 4 can go to are in two different
00:29 directions down the A19, the closest being in Bolden, very much on the borderline of
00:34 Sunderland and neighbouring South Tyneside.
00:36 The increasing popularity of streaming and huge television sets, the effects of the Covid-19
00:41 pandemic, a seemingly ever-spiralling cost of living crisis, doubtless these have all
00:46 played a part in Sunderland's cinema's decline.
00:49 There was a time, of course, when things were very different.
00:51 Going to the pictures, at least once a week, used to be the main form of entertainment
00:55 for waysiders.
00:56 And, hard as it is to believe now, there was a time when Sunderland's town centre had
01:01 a cinema on practically every corner.
01:03 In addition, many suburbs of the town could also boast their own local picture hall.
01:08 You could go and see a film on your local high street as easily as, for example, you
01:11 could track down a branch of Greggs on them now.
01:17 This building in Homeside was first opened in 1932 as Black's Regal Cinema and it cost
01:23 a whopping £100,000.
01:26 You could see 2,500 people.
01:29 Bear in mind that an average modern multiplex auditorium holds around 230.
01:35 It also employed more than 60 staff.
01:37 Today, as you can see, it's a branch of Mecca Big War.
01:40 But happily we aren't here to lament the brutal gutting of the original elegant building.
01:45 Quite the contrary.
01:46 Inside, it still has what the Cinema Theatre Association describes as "the finest surviving
01:51 cinema auditorium in the North East".
01:54 Not surprisingly, given this pedigree, the building isn't listed.
01:58 But it is extremely well maintained by Mecca, who own the premises outright.
02:02 Richard Gray of the aforementioned Cinema Theatre Association has said "Sunderland
02:05 Regal, as was, possesses the largest and best remaining 1930s cinema auditorium in the North
02:11 East, north of York in fact.
02:13 The highlight of the auditorium is the original pair of 'dancing ladies' on either side
02:16 of what was the stage, where live entertainment went hand in hand with cinema."
02:20 When Black's Regal first opened, the talkies had already begun.
02:23 How can we explain this to young people?
02:27 Early films essentially had no audio track.
02:29 The situation had only changed in the 1920s.
02:32 Many careers were abruptly ended when the real-life speaking voices of various hugs
02:36 and vamps were not all the public might have hoped them to be.
02:39 But in 1932, while the writing was on the wall for silent films, they were still being
02:44 made.
02:45 Therefore an organ was required for musical accompaniment, and the Regals was a magnificent
02:49 example.
02:50 The Regal venue was equipped with a fabulous Compton theatre organ, the best that money
02:53 could buy, which rose from beneath the stage floor.
02:56 The first organist was Arnold Eagle, or "Eagle of the Regal" as he was inevitably referred
03:01 to, until he left in 1946.
03:03 Today the organ is stored in Rye, having been bought by the Sunderland Theatre Organ Preservation
03:08 Society.
03:09 Yes, there is such a thing, when the cinema closed.
03:13 In 1959, Black's was taken over by the giant Rank Organisation and became the Odeon.
03:18 The front stalls entrance in Park Lane shut permanently in 1964 and capacity fell by 300.
03:24 It was divided into a three screen cinema in 1975, with 1,200 seats in the former circle
03:29 and two 150 seat screens in the rear stalls.
03:37 The early 1980s was a barren period for cinemas generally, with video hire shops becoming
03:42 all the rage.
03:43 Until June 26th 1982, with the Odeon closed permanently and its seats stripped out, the
03:49 venue soon re-opened as the top ranked Bingo Hall and eventually the Mecca.
03:54 The last pair of films to be shown on Homeside were The Empire Strikes Back, the second in
03:58 the umpteen movie Star Wars franchise, and Mary Millington's True Blue Confessions, which
04:03 was a tawdry tribute to one of the 1970s sex symbols.
04:09 Cinema of course was not done for in the 1980s.
04:13 It was very much the age of the blockbusters.
04:14 Just a little way up from the former Regal Cinema is another place where it was open
04:19 until the last year of the 20th century and quite often for a big film you would see queues
04:25 proverbially or literally in fact going right round the block.
04:28 Right here in fact is where our cameraman joined the afternoon queue to see Batman in
04:34 1989 and later Jurassic Park in 1993.
04:38 At least one raider of the sun and egg has assured us that queues for the original Star
04:41 Wars in 1977 went round the building at least twice.
04:46 Getting into these queues felt like settling in for the duration and orders of chips and
04:49 gravy from the bakers oven across the street were not an uncommon pre-cinema snack.
04:54 And here is where the front of those queues would have been.
04:58 Now a collection of night spots called The Point, it was in its time variously The Ritz,
05:02 The ABC, The Cannon and then The ABC again.
05:05 Echo Raider, Anne Work, had some recollections of going to see Psycho here in 1960.
05:10 She told us it was the first time you could only go in to see it from the start as at
05:13 that time cinemas had continuous rolling viewing.
05:16 You could actually stay in all day if you wished.
05:18 She remembers the looks of faces of people who came out of the first house.
05:22 If you were second house people were coming out after seeing it with horrified looks on
05:26 their faces.
05:27 Mickey Thompson, she had an equally horrifying moment with us from towards the end of the
05:31 cinemas lifespan when he went to see Titanic there and lost four teeth eating a peanut
05:36 brittle.
05:39 Picture houses were so common back in the day that here in Monk Weymouth there were
05:43 a couple of them just 300 feet apart.
05:45 They were The Roker and The Corer.
05:48 The Corer was the elder having opened in 1907 as the Weed Sheaf Picture Hall.
05:53 Of course Sutherland still has a Weed Sheaf pub very near where The Corer stood.
05:58 When Maccams refer to the general area of this junction they still call it The Weed
06:01 Sheaf.
06:05 In 1911 the picture house changed its name to The Coronation Picture Palace, known by
06:09 everyone as The Corer, to mark the coronation of George V and the building was more or less
06:15 where I'm standing right now.
06:17 And it didn't exactly have right royal standards.
06:19 Indeed it was perhaps one of the first Sutherland cinemas to be known fondly among locals as
06:24 The Flea Pit, no doubt thanks in large part to its temporary closure in 1930 by the Health
06:29 Authority.
06:30 It was unusual in that the chamber seats in the very front stalls were simply benches.
06:34 The toilets, as was common at the time, were outside with access via the front stalls.
06:39 But on the plus side the prices were as low as the standards, with prices at 2p or 3p
06:45 compared to the 2 shillings over the river at The Regal.
06:52 Not far off was The Roker Cinema, aptly enough on Roker Avenue.
06:56 In that cinemas early years each film was accompanied by music from a 10 piece orchestra.
07:01 The cinema was right behind where I'm standing now.
07:04 During the 1920s Friday nights at The Roker were trial nights, when local amateurs could
07:08 perform on stage between the showing of the films.
07:11 A spot of Roker's got talent if you will.
07:14 Both The Roker and The Corer were modernised in order to show talkies in 1931.
07:19 The Corer eventually closed in 1959 and The Roker in 1961, casualties of the increasing
07:25 popularity of television.
07:27 Another cinema in the vicinity that did not make it that far was The Bromarsh.
07:31 It stood over the road from where I am now, I'm standing at St Peter's Metro station.
07:35 Opened in 1906 the building had previously been a chapel before it was a waxworks exhibition.
07:40 It was renamed over its lifetime from Monk William Outh Picture Hall to The Bridge Cinema
07:44 and then The Bromarsh.
07:45 It would have stood round about here but it was destroyed by bombs during World War II
07:50 and it was never rebuilt.
07:51 There was a particular poignancy to this tragedy as five of nine siblings lost their lives
07:56 in this direct hit from Hitler's bombs, partly due to their youthful imaginations.
08:04 Aged between two and sixteen, these five children of Bertie and Elizabeth Humble could have
08:08 shared an air-raid shelter with their downstairs neighbours in Howick Street.
08:12 However, they were scared to do so because of the ghost stories their neighbours would
08:16 tell.
08:17 When the siren went off on May 24th 1943, the family headed instead for the nearby shelter
08:21 in the basement of The Bromarsh Cinema.
08:24 Only the parents and three of their children came out of the bombing raid alive.
08:28 The shelter that they could have used back home, meanwhile, survived undamaged.
08:38 The Havelock opened in December 1915 on the site of the old Havelock House store from
08:42 which it took its name.
08:44 The first sound film to come to Sunderland would have been The Singing Fool starring
08:47 Al Jolson in 1929 and from the Havelock cinema, the queues would stretch in right down High
08:54 Street.
08:55 It was the only cinema in town which provided hearing aids which were attached to the end
08:59 seats and also boasted a fine coffee on the first floor.
09:02 A light was built on the very top of the cinema in the shape of a diver's helmet.
09:07 At one time, beams shone out of the four face pieces until one of them was blocked up following
09:11 reasonable complaints that, so close to the river's entrance, it was misleading at times
09:16 for shipping.
09:17 The remaining three light apertures were later blocked up due to blackout regulations during
09:21 the Second World War and didn't make a comeback.
09:24 Later changing its name to The Gourmand, the Havelock was another cinema that did not survive
09:28 the television revolution and it closed in the early 1960s.
09:32 The Blacks Theatre Royal in Bedford Street, right here, really wasn't the place to be
09:37 on your own on a dark night.
09:40 And that's especially the case if you're a woman and you're in the women's staff room.
09:45 If you were, chances were you'd get to see a vision of someone disappearing into the
09:50 wall.
09:51 All this is according to one man who should know.
09:53 Bill Mather spent 53 years in the industry and recounted to us the uncanny events in
09:59 the women's staff room which was downstairs in the foyer.
10:02 Women would not stay downstairs on their own and all of them had experienced disturbing
10:06 sightings of someone dashing across the floor area, through the wall, under the underfloor
10:10 area where the seats were stored, he said.
10:14 It later emerged that the same underfloor area was once part of a boarding house where
10:18 there had been a death.
10:20 Bill also recalled a Mrs Grey as the first female manager in the country to manage a
10:24 cinema under the then Gourmand British Circuit which had some 275+ cinemas around the country.
10:32 She was manager of The Palace, Sunderland, near the Empire from 1920 until its closure.
10:37 It appears she was happy to pitch in with the everyday tasks though as she used to play
10:41 the grand piano which was in front of the stage on Saturday morning junior shows.
10:45 Even before the multiplexes started to close, the age of the picture houses at their height
10:50 was long since over but happily a little fragment of the romance of those days is being preserved.
10:55 The Grand Picture Palace in Ryop was another of those that was there for the arrival of
10:59 talkies.
11:00 Born in Ryop in 1909, Jack Taylor became a projectionist at the Grand aged 21 after being
11:05 paid off from his job as a blacksmith.
11:08 He once told the Echo about a member of the audience, I quote "Geordie the bugger, who
11:12 was a terrible loud talker and was there shouting his mouth off saying he couldn't possibly
11:16 make a picture talk.
11:18 When he did he was speechless.
11:19 People who manage to do nothing and everything at the same time are not unique to the social
11:23 media age."
11:24 At the time of this recording, the same theatre that silenced Geordie is being rebuilt brick
11:28 by brick at Open Air Museum, Beamish.
11:32 It too had become a bingo hall in the 1960s and by the 90s was being used as a place to
11:36 store cars and their parts.
11:38 But following an extraordinarily long intermission, the Grand is set to resume life as a cinema
11:44 in its new home as part of Beamish's 1950s town.
11:48 It's nice to know a part of the vanishing legacy will be preserved.
11:51 And on that we fade out but not before thanking Phil Curtis of the Sutherland Antiquarians
11:57 for the enormous help he's given us in putting this together.