Hidden City: Scala (Odeon Queensway/Ringway) Cinema, Birmingham

Sometimes places show their history fairly obviously on the surface, such as in 'ghost signs' & suchlike, & sometimes the history is not at all evident. I feel this may be more the case for recent history: signs are not now as indelible as the structural signage of the past was, & buildings are more often designed to be repurposed or multipurpose. This does not mean that the relentless pursuit of permanence has ended, it just means the signs of what has gone before may not be so evident. Normally this doesn't apply to cinemas - in their heyday they were built to be statements but there are at least two cinemas in Birmingham that have closed in recent years that are not obvious. One was the one in the Arcadian Centre. Oh, there's a wonderful photo tour of Birmingham's vanished cinemas here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/sparks68/sets/72157626367186324/detail/

On Holloway Circus at the bottom of Smallbrook Queensway in Birmingham stands Scala House. It looks like a typical 1960s office block (in fact offices are to rent in it: http://queensgatebirmingham.com/scala-house.php), & has had various uses over the years, including radio station, club, take aways, & most recently a gay health centre, but nobody ever believes part of it started off life as a cinema. Until I realised this I wondered why there was a sort of mugger-concealing recess in the underpass, which I'd always assumed was just bad planning, but it turns out it was the exit doors from the main screen, which was below ground level. To me this is the perfect example of the 60s dream of recreating communities in new settings: presumably the planners were thinking that you could live in one of the tower blocks in the city, work in the city, then in the evening watch a film in one of the cinemas in the city. I do find this one interesting because unlike the Odeon on New Street it does not look at all the way you expect a cinema to look.

In fact there was a theatre on this site before the 60s redevelopment: this is the building shown in the almost unrecognisable first picture, & a more recent view of it in the final picture.

'The Scala Superama Cinema was built as a replacement for the old 1914 Scala Theatre which had been closed in 1960. Contained in a new office block named Scala House, the cinema was a project of Compton Films Ltd. who distributed sex orientated foreign films and operated sex cinemas and cinema clubs in London. The Scala Superama was designed as a �Roadshow� house, together with the new Superama Cinema in Derby.[...]

'It was re-named Odeon Queensway in June 1972 and re-furbished in 1983. It was at this time that the Cinecenta twin cinema next door was taken over by the Rank organisation and was incorporated into the Odeon Queensway.' (http://cinematreasures.org/theaters/22098)

The second picture shows the present building when it was still operational (just for the evidence that it was actually there), & the final picture shows the scene of more recent years.

'It originally opened as the single-screen Birmingham Scala Superama Cinema on November 23, 1964 when Compton Films was distributing sexual foreign films to its venues in London. The Rank Organisation took it over from February 22, 1970 and it was renamed the Odeon Ringway until June 1972 when it became the Odeon Queensway. Refurbished in 1983 it was suddenly closed down in 1988.' (http://www.birminghampost.co.uk/whats-on/film-tv/former-manager-mike-ellis-takes-6092352 This page is an interview with the former manager)

The end came for this cinema in the 1980s when Odeon decided they would refurbish their cinema on New Street, in response to competition from the National Exhibition Centre, using equipment from the Odeon on Queensway. According to the interview referenced above they still had 25 years to go on the lease (& it wasn't like they were going to let a competitor take the lease of a cinema off them) & that is why the cinema part of the building has remained unused. In 2010 the original large auditorium was there although largely stripped, it's been urbexed (http://www.28dayslater.co.uk/forums/theatres-cinemas/54142-odeon-scala-house-birmingham-sept-2010-a.html), & you can almost smell the cigarette smoke on those curtains, can't you?

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