The Odeon at
Kingstanding, Birmingham, was a 1930s cinema in the
Odeon chain. Though closed as a cinema in 1962, the building survives as a bingo hall, and is
Grade II listed.
History
The cinema was constructed between 1935 and 1936 to a symmetrical,
modernist,
art deco design by
Harry Weedon and
Cecil Clavering,[1][2] the latter having joined the former's practice, as an assistant, in 1933.[3] It was commissioned as an independent cinema, and was due to be called "The Beacon",[2] after nearby
Barr Beacon, but
Oscar Deutsch became involved, and the cinema opened as part of his Odeon chain on 22 July 1935.[2] It was built to serve Kingstanding's new, 4,000-home working-class housing estate[4] and had 968 seats in the stalls and 324 in the circle. The first film was The Lives of a Bengal Lancer, starring
Gary Cooper.[2]
The brick building[1] occupies a wedge-shaped site between Kings Road and Kettlehouse Road, overlooking and facing Kingstanding Circle. The centre of the glazed cream and black tile ("faience") frontage features three slender fins, also finished with faience, above a stepped brick parapet.[1][5] Clavering, inspired by the
Lichtburg cinema in Berlin, originally intended that these fins would be topped by a searchlight.[6][7]
It was given Grade-II listed status by
English Heritage just 44 years after its erection, on 10 October 1980.[1] It has been described as "one of the best surviving examples of Odeon cinemas in Britain".[3]
^Richard Gray, Cinemas in Britain: One Hundred Years of Cinema Architecture, London: Lund Humphries, 1996,
ISBN978-0-85331-685-5, p. 92: "The original idea was for a searchlight to be mounted on the fins which would scan the night sky, like at the Lichtburg in Berlin. This idea was dropped when Deutsch took over [the cinema]".