The right feeling
Alan Powers takes an architectural pilgrimage to Stratford to see a new cinema
For Spectator readers, I imagine that a visit to Stratford-on-Avon means a visit to the theatre rather than to one of the half- timbered tourist showplaces, or the supple- mentary apparatus of mass-tourism. Elizabeth Scott's Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which opened in 1932 and replaced the major part of its fire-damaged Victorian predecessor, was a brave gesture in its time with no hey-nonny-nonny about it, a building of integrity rather than grace, which makes a thorough synthesis of its German and Scandinavian sources, not quite traditional and not quite modem, oddly resembling our current state of archi- tectural equilibrium.
There is not much other modern archi- tecture worthy of note in the town, although the owner of Flowers' brewery, who supported the rebuilding of the the- atre, commissioned one of his pub archi- tects to build a row of workers' cottages near the canal, on the Birmingham Road, in 1937. This architect, called Yorke, brought his modernist, beer-drinking son, F.R.S. Yorke (later the architect of Gatwick Airport), in on the job and they produced a prototype for much modest post-war housing with not a single piece of concrete or steel in sight.
Now there is a third reason for an archi- tectural pilgrimage to Stratford, which is even more surprising. In a side-street near the centre, a new cinema opened last year, in a converted industrial building. Suitably called the Picture House, this is one of a small independent chain of cinemas belonging to City Screen which specialises in well-designed small town-centre sites and in employing interesting designers. The Stratford Picture House was recently the subject of an exhibition (now touring) at the RIBA in a series called 'How did they do that?' which, apart from telling people quite literally how an architectural commis- sion comes about, expresses a kind of dis- belief in the possibility of building something modern in England today. Plan- ning committees are usually minded to resist everything that architects have been trained to do, so that, while architects may sometimes be wrong, the results are seldom successful when they are told, in the name of the greater public good, not to enjoy themselves but to do things they neither like nor understand.
The Stratford Picture House has been funded by the Arts Council Lottery, so there are special circumstances which may encourage others to follow. The architects, Panter Hudspith, are a London practice established ten years ago, and have given the Picture House a rather Dutch 1920s treatment with varied colours, planes and materials, forming an architectural journey from ground to second floor where the two `screens' are entered. It starts on the out- side with good lettering in metal and neon, distinctive but not too loud, to draw you across a little entrance yard and continues upstairs with underlit strips of glass in the treads, and snaky clusters of light-fittings by Lindsay Bloxham overhead. On the landing you come face to face with a subtle dark blue two-part artwork by Sandra Mas- terson before entering a foyer with a well- designed bar for serving standard cinema sustenance. Here the architecture was in competition with the promotional cut-outs and posters for Disney's latest film, for this cannot pretend to be an art gallery, but the wood-strip floor and window-seats were a welcome change from carpet and off-the- peg furniture and enhanced the effect of space. On the floor above there is a grown- up bar with an outdoor terrace and an attractive snuggery off to the side.
The Stratford Picture House fulfils the criterion which the architectural writer and photographer Eric de Mare said was impossible for the English in 1951 (he was writing about Tivoli in Copenhagen), `democratic gaiety without vulgarity'. It feels local and friendly, like a club, and although it represents a piece of high cul- 'And the nominations for the best political scandal . . . ' ture parachuted in, it is the real thing rather than being, like the super-cinemas of the 1930s, a slightly pretentious cut-price version of something else. It is all quite simple and modest, and it is fun, which cannot be said, even now, of much modern architecture, however worthy it may be in other ways. It is more encouraging to find the right feeling even in a building as small as this than to contemplate the compulsory mass-gaiety of the Millennium Dome.
Previous page
