Salford cinemas .... I wish I had visited

Now you will have to have been born sometime before 1960 to really remember going to the “flicks” on Great Cheetham Street.

At the "flicks" Great Cheetham Street, 2022

You can still visit the building but according to one source the cinema closed in 1966, having undergone several name changes before variously becoming a bingo hall, an indoor market, a carpet shop, children’s play centre and now a cash and carry.*

My old chum Andy passed it recently and couldn’t resist taking a photograph, and sent it over with the message that this was the “Empire Electric Theatre, opened 1913, closed 1966”.*

And here comes my confusion because on searching through my back copies of the Kinematograph Yearbook, from 1914 through to 1947, it is consistently listed as the Empire Picture House.

There was indeed the Salford Electric Theatre which opened in 1912 on Trafford Road offering “twice nightly” performances, but closed on August 9th 1959 when Wilfred Hyde White starred in “Emergency Ward 10. 

Choose your cinema, 1928

In 1960, the cinema was purchased by the British Legion for use as a social club which it remained until its demolition in 1981”.**

It appears also that by 1947 it was listed as the Empire Electric Theatre.

So there you are you pay your 5d to 1/- and take your choice of a name.

As for the one on Great Cheetham Street in 1914  it could seat 800 and was managed by a Benjamin Smooth.

Location; Salford

Pictures; the cinema, 20022, from the collection of Andy Robertson and cinema listings from The Kinematograpgh Year Book for 1928

* We Grew up in Salford, https://m.facebook.com/photo.php?fbid=985976895137634&id=100011759989249&set=gm.10158955131755752&eav=AfbcBgiGm9slM43sAISTfCjwXZFeqlZYPyAgiA3t-Y97w_svfYK4pFY2KOVGi40I3ak&paipv=0&source=57

** Empire Cinema, Trafford Road, Salford, M5, cinema TREASURES, http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/2117