Among the kinds of objects listed in on our survey of moving image and screen-related artefacts in UK collections are cinemas. Are there any actual cinemas as exhibits in museums? We know of two. The Ulster Folk and Transport Museum in Cultra, Co. Down, recently acquired a 1920s cinema and moved it brick by brick from the town of Gilford to the museum’s site, where it has been restored to in its original form and opened as a cinema once more on 13 June 2007. And the Black Country Living Museum in Dudley has the Limelight Cinema, which likewise was moved brick by brick from its original location at Harts Hill, Brierley Hill, where it had stood since 1921. As the museum’s website tells us:
The auditorium could seat up to 103 people on wooden benches and on eighteen padded, tip up chairs.
The projection room was kitted out with a Dreadnought Bioscope and a 1912 Ernemann Bioscope. The light source for these vintage projectors was the old fashioned method of an electric arc light. The adjacent workshop houses the two gas engines used to generate the electricity required.
Running the cinema was a family affair Mr Revil, the owner, operated the projectors assisted by his nephew, Leslie Ball. Mrs Revil sold the tuppence ha’penny and fivepenny tickets from a small wooden pay booth and their daughter Violet played records on a wind up gramophone as the musical accompaniment to the silent films.
The nostalgia of the silent movies is relived every day at the Museum with a regularly changing programme and frequent showings. Settle down on a hard bench and indulge with Charlie Chaplin, Laurel & Hardy and Harold Lloyd among many other old favourites.
Are there any other examples out there?
The closest I can think to an addition to your list is the Welsh Picture House which was ‘virtually’ moved to the Museum of Welsh Life in St. Fagans. The Oakdale Workmen’s Institute, transported brick-by-brick to the museum in 1989, housed a cinema in the ‘New Hall’. The re-creation of this cinema in the Lesser Hall (sadly the original was apparently ‘too large for the site’) opened its doors in 2004. It is hosted by cinema staff in 1930s uniforms, and is simply programmed with a short, silent film called Hen Grefftau Cymru, produced in the 1930s by Sir Ifan ab Owen Edwards. For more information:
http://www.museumwales.ac.uk/en/news/?article_id=82
Many thanks for this. A related initiative is the Tyneside Cinema, which is undergoing a major re-development which includes restoring the 1930s newsreel theatre it is built around and producing a museum-type display on the history of newsreels around. There’s information on the project here:
http://www.tynecine.org/appeal/redevelopment.php
and on the newsreel theatre itself here:
http://www.tynecine.org/appeal/the_last_newsreel.php
[...] them the Broadway cinema in Bristol, which closed its doors in 1972. As we’ve already seen in Cinemas in Museums, some cinemas have been painstakingly re-located within museums but generally buildings are not the [...]