Action! Builders return to Chiswick Cinema site

After a month-long pause, construction work resumes to build five-screen cinema in Chiswick High Road

Lockdown only briefly interrupted construction of Chiswick’s new multiplex – a five-screen cinema on the site of what was, for 40 years, the sombre black Ballet Rambert building.

Although it has been a project fraught with issues and delays (coronavirus prompting the most recent month-long pause), everything is now on track for a Christmas 2020 opening.

What was once to have been the Chiswick Lane Picturehouse will now be simply The Chiswick Cinema – it’s the first new movie theatre in town since the 1930s, with Turnham Green the closest tube station.

There will be nearly 500 seats in total, with a commitment to showing arthouse films and foreign language films as well as mainstream movies.

The hope is to energise and revive a part of the High Road that currently lacks the night-time buzz of other stretches, with dramatic floor-to-ceiling glass frontages adding a splash of light to what has, for years, been a forlorn mothballed site.

What’s the plan?

From the street, filmgoers will enter through a café/bar leading to a lobby, with Screen 1 straight ahead.

Screen 2 will be off to one side, while upstairs there will be a third main screen. Those rooms will each have audience capacities of 100+, while there will also be two dinky preview rooms, which could be hired for private parties, each with 15 exclusive comfy seats.

Progress on construction was delayed last year by having to take legal action to evict squatters, but by May 2019 the old Rambert Ballet studio had been bulldozed and work had started in earnest on the skeleton of the new complex.

Full screen ahead

Now the workmen are maintaining social distancing as they go full steam ahead on what should be the final six months of constructing the three wheelchair-accessible levels.

“I believe in the effect that cinema can have in boosting the local economy,” said project director Lyn Goleby, adding that she hoped it would act as a stimulus to pubs and restaurants at a time when, post-Covid19, they will need all the help they can get.

She has pledged to reintroduce the kind of cinema-going experiences many senior Chiswick residents recall from their youth, such as Saturday morning pictures for children and cheap tickets for students.

“Founder memberships have all sold out, and we’ve been overwhelmed by the support and enthusiasm of the local community,” said Lyn.

Commitment

The commitment of residents to the project will be further gauged in three months’ time, when standard membership becomes available in September.

Members will have their own exclusive bar and roof terrace to congregate in, but post-coronavirus restrictions may yet have an impact on how the new complex functions.

The notion of a smiling face at a ticket desk has had to be replaced by automated dispensing machines, for instance.

History of site

Ballet Rambert occupied the site at 94 Chiswick High Road from the spring of 1971 (when it was opened by Ingrid Bergman) until the summer of 2013, but it then remained empty for six years.

The new cinema will retain some of the recovered artwork and posters from the Ballet Rambert days, to celebrate the building’s artistic heritage.

Public help was enlisted to come up with a name for the new cinema (inevitably Cinema McCinemaface was one suggestion, as well as ChisFlick), but out of 30 or more proposals, The Chiswick Cinema was the straightforward choice with more than 50% of votes.

Slew of cinemas

Back in the day, Chiswick boasted a slew of cinemas. There was the Palais at 365 Chiswick High Road, a 350-seat picturehouse which vanished during the First World War; the Electric on the corner of the High Road and Duke Road; the Cinema Royal at 160, now The Old Cinema vintage and retro showroom; and the dear old Chiswick Empire at 414, a variety theatre which also showed films.

But down at the Hammersmith end of the High Road there was also the Commodore, Stamford Brook, a brash 1929 art deco cinema (and later, bingo hall), complete with lurid underwater murals on the inner walls.

It stood near the point where Chiswick High Road becomes King Street… a thorn in the side of residents of sleepy St Peter’s Square just behind it.

Further along King Street, on the Hammersmith Town Hall building site, the former 2,257-seat Cineworld (previously UGC, previously ABC, previously Regal, previously The Blue Halls!) is being replaced by a four-screen Curzon.

There is also a 300-seat cinema within POSK, the Polish social and cultural centre at 238 King Street. 

Full details on the progress of The Chiswick Cinema at: www.chiswickcinema.co.uk