York’s first purpose-built cinema
This façade on Fossgate is far grander than those of the businesses on either side. And for good reason. A furniture shop for nearly 60 years, then reborn as a restaurant in 2016, the building was originally an entertainment palace. Opened in 1911 as the Electric Theatre, it was the first purpose-built cinema in York.
They pulled out all the stops for the opening night. The owners wore silk top hats and had carnations in their buttonholes, and the lord mayor attended. One of the owners told the assembled dignitaries: “In these theatres the tired ones can find comfort, those afflicted with ennui could be resuscitated to new life in fresh surroundings, and the drunkard made to forget the existence of the public house.”
Info
Address Scala Showrooms, 19-22 Fossgate, York YO1 9TA | Public Transport Closest bus stop: Stonebow | Tip York hosts a number of community cinemas. Check out Film At The Folk Hall in New Earswick, and the South Bank Community Cinema off Nunthorpe Road.
The Electric was one of three Gaumont British Cinemas in the city – the others being St George’s in Castlegate, better known today as Fairfax House, and the Picture House on Coney Street. The Picture House and the Electric shared the Movietone News reel, so it was the job of the pageboy to run across town with it from one cinema to the other.
The Electric had a nickname: the “Laugh and Scratch.” Even in the silent movie years it must have been a noisy place. York’s early moviegoers recalled how they would walk to their seats on the crunch of peanut shells and how the piano accompanied the action scenes while the violin was kept for sob stories. In those days you could sometimes get in even if you had no money – there are tales of people swapping jam jars for tickets.
The arrival of the “talkies” prompted another wave of cinema-building in the 1930s, including the impressive Odeon, the Art Deco building on Blossom Street, which opened in 1937 and today is known as Reel. In 1947, York councillors voted to allow cinemas to open on Sundays. But the golden age of cinema was almost over and the Electric, by now renamed the Scala, closed in 1957.
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