So Long, Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre

I undertook a melancholy pilgrimage along the Central Line to pay my last respects to the Pyke’s Cinematograph Theatre in Shepherds Bush this week, after a tip-off from one of the readers. As you can see, all that is left standing is a fragment of the facade of this early temple of moving pictures.

Impresario Montague Pyke opened the Shepherd’s Bush Cinematograph Theatre on 3rd March 1910 and it showed films until 1981, when it closed with The Fog. In 1923, after Pyke went bankrupt, it was reconfigured by John Stanley Beard as the New Palladium, becoming subsequently the Palladium, the Essoldo, the Classic, and finally Odeon 2. Despite surviving a flying bomb, a period of dereliction and a decade as the Walkabout Australasian bar, it has not escaped the voracious developers of our day.

Sitting next to the Shepherds Bush Pavilion and the Shepherds Bush Empire, in the Shepherds Bush Conservation Area, you might think this line of fine palaces of culture and entertainment overlooking the green were integral to the identity of the place. Yet last year Hammersmith & Fulham Council granted permission for full demolition except part of the front wall, which will be stuck onto the hotel tower in spread sheet architecture that will occupy this site in future.

Bearing a formal resemblance to a triumphal arch from ancient times, this fragment stands now as a poignant relic of another world, a vanished universe of the romance of early cinema – black and white films, live musical accompaniment and the advent of talkies. Innumerable dreams that were conjured here have vanished, leaving just this wrack of an arch – the portal to an era of cinematic glamour and fantasy forever lost to us.

You will recall I have lamented the growing resemblance of London to the backlot of an abandoned movie studio, full of frontages, so the irony of a cinema now joining the parade of facades has not escaped me.