Head Space Daily Words...

I went to the cinema today to watch Gravity in 3-D and what a great experience it was too – an incredible film - but I had to travel to the Ritzy in Brixton to see it. Don’t get me wrong, I love the Ritzy and everything it stands for, I’ve got a soft spot for Brixton too having lived there for a few years but I am a resident of the London Borough of Lewisham, which has the exact number of ZERO cinemas within its boundaries. A friend shared a link at the weekend entitled Lewisham's Lost Cinemas (click title for link)which reveals that over twenty cinemas have existed at one time or another in Lewisham since the early 1900s. The article features photographs of the sites of these cinemas as they are today and when you hover your cursor over the pictures, seamlessly superimposed images of the original cinema buildings appear. One of the locations is now a car wash, which is a terrible waste. The effect is to make you feel sad for the loss of the buildings, as well as nostalgic for what was once there and what we are missing today. It made me wonder why they were shut down and there are probably a variety of reasons. Could it have been that so many cinemas, all after a piece of the pie, were left feeding off crumbs and not financially viable? Perhaps the time that many of them were closed down reflect the political and economic situations of the era. There was apparently a cinema on London Road in Forest Hill, which doesn’t seem to feature in the article, called the Capitol – picture below – which appears to have been absolutely huge.

When was the last time you went to the cinema with a thousand strong audience? Maybe the sheer size of these cinemas made them unsustainable. Today, there were six other people watching Gravity with me on the Ritzy’s main screen. Admittedly it was an 11.15AM screening but there are over 350 seats in there. This is why cinemas today have to be more than simply places to screen films and must be one of the reasons why many of these fabulous art deco buildings became bingo halls. I imagine as cinemas they would have spent all week sitting empty but throw in the chance to win a few bob and the ‘glamour’ of the bingo hall and hey presto, packed houses and a revenue. The former Capitol Cinema, which I mention above is now a Wetherspoon’s pub. Seeing all those black and white and faded pictures of old movie houses in the article does make you long for a golden age of cinema, which may or may not have existed but to have the equivalent of the Ritzy, in Lewisham, would not only be a great place to watch films but would also lift the area. Cinemas like the Ritzy are centres in the community, for all ages, to be entertained, educated and inspired – a venue to hang out, socialise and communicate. They are genuine focal points, which bring people together and a Ritzy type cinema certainly wouldn’t go amiss in Lewisham. Having watched Gravity, I feel like I have just been on an exhilarating roller-coaster ride but it would have been nice to have experienced it on my own manor...