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There has been
a cinema on the Northumbria Drive site in Henleaze, Bristol for
over 60 years.
Those six decades have been sprinkled with death, robbery and two
successful campaigns to keep the movies rolling.
It all began in 1937 when Stone & Co began building a design
by architect Alec French.
The original picture house was a classic 1930s-style Art Deco building
with an impressive facade, complete with a giant window at the front
and stone steps leading up to several entrances.
Inside there was a marble foyer with stairs leading up to the balcony
and the auditorium, also in Art Deco style.
The Orpheus
projection room. |
Tragedy struck
during the building programme, as Stone & Co's then tea boy
Bill Leslie recounted to me.
It was Bill's job to make the tea for all the workers, including
the plasterers working on the scaffolding in the massive auditorium.
'They used to leave their billy cans with milk in for me to fill
up with tea," he recalls.
"I then
had to clamber up the scaffolding and deliver the cans back to them.
"One chap would move from one side of the building to the other
darting along the planks resting on the scaffolding, one day a few
planks were not as secure as they had been and they gave way as
he stepped on them.
"He fell, hitting the bars on the way down. There was nothing
anyone could do."
The rest of the work was, thankfully, uneventful and the Orpheus
opened on 16 February 1938 in a ceremony performed by the Lord Mayor.
The first programme included "Lost Horizon" directed by
Frank Capra and starring Ronald Coleman.
An early
cinema programme. |
Owned by a consortium
of local businessmen headed up by Chairman George Pugsley, the cinema
flourished both in post and pre-war suburban Bristol.
It used state-of-the-art equipment and the high standard of customer
care that all patrons to cinemas expected in those days.
But as audiences declined in the late 1950s the house, like many
in the city, struggled to keep up to date with new technology.
The cost of
widescreen equipment was particularly expensive but proved to be
a must as most people expected this new style of presentation.
By 1971 audiences were at an all time low and dozens of cinemas
across the country were shutting their doors for good each month
or converting into bingo halls.
Orpheus was sold off to the John Lewis Partnership. The final film
in the classic 30s movie house was Catch 22 - a fitting title for
a site that had put up a brave fight.
A flyer from
one of the campaigns to save the cinema. |
That could easily
have been the end but local people campaigned for their cinema and
won a partial reprieve.
Too costly to convert the existing building for their needs, the
supermarket consortium incorporated a three screen mini complex
in the plans for the new building.
In late 1973 the Star company opened it doors with a flurry of camera
flashes and Miss Great Britain performing another opening ceremony
on the Northumbria Drive site.
One of the
movies on show that week was the latest Bond movie Live and Let
Die - another apt title as by now the name Orpheus had disappeared.
The 1970s were tricky for the cinema.
Audience numbers were still low, although the public of Henleaze
and surrounding areas loved cinema so much they kept it going with
reasonable attendance.
By the eighties Star had disappeared and the Cannon group took over,
bringing the cinema under the umbrella of a company that already
ran the Whiteladies and the New Bristol Centre.
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