film – Modern Mooch

AMC – The Point Milton Keynes

Posted on April 13, 2024April 13, 2024 by modernmoocher

602 Midsummer Blvd Milton Keynes MK9 3NB

Famous in the history of British cinema as being the first purpose built multiplex cinema to be built in the UK. The 10-screen AMC-The Point opened on 23rd November 1985 with a Royal Premiere of the Harrison Ford film Presumed Innocent which was attended by Sarah, Duchess of York.

Built for and operated by American Multi-Cinemas, it has a foyer section, designed in the shape of a pyramid, hence the name The Point. The supporting struts were originally edged in red neon. The structure containing the auditoriums is just a plain block. Also in the complex is a Gala Bingo Club located under the cinema foyer entrance, a nightclub and cafes and restaurants.

In December 1988, it was taken over by UCI and re-named. In April 2003 it was leased to easyCinema, operated by the budget airline easyJet, when a policy of taking bookings only online and charging a minimum admission, created interest, but turned out to be a failure. In May 2006 it was taken over by Odeon Cinemas Group. Seating capacities in the screens range from 248, down to 156.

The Odeon was closed on 26th February 2015 with Kingsman, The Last Service being the final film in one its auditoriums. There had been hope that the cinema would be given a Grade II Listed status due to its historical relevance as the UK’s first multiplex cinema, but it was turned down by English Heritage. It will be demolished and replaced by new shops and leisure facilities. The Gala Bingo Club – re-named Buzz Bingo Club from June 2018, was closed on March 21, 2020 due to the Covid-19 Pandemic. It was announced on 15th July 2020 that the closure would be permanent.

Milton Keynes now has a new 16-screen Odeon Stadium + IMAX, located at the MK Dons Stadium, which has an IMAX screen and two screens equipped with Atmos sound. It opened on 27th February, 2015.

Cinema Treasures

Designed by Building Design Partnership, the Point was reputedly inspired by the work of avant grade provocateurs Archigram and became an instant Milton Keynes landmark upon its opening in 1985. As well has being one of the UK’s first multiplex cinemas, the unconventional structure housed a games arcade, bingo hall and nightclub. These individual functions are externally expressed as stacked, mirrored boxes beneath the 70ft bright red steel pyramidal frame – illuminated at night as a space-age beacon across the low-rise city centre.

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An application as been submitted by developers GHL – Galliard Holdings Ltd, the intention is to demolish the famous pyramid structure and replace it with 487 new flats in tower blocks of up to 21 storeys high.

MK Citizen

There is a local grassroots campaign to save the Point – with its own Facebook page.

On the day of my visit April 10th 2024 – this is what it looks like.

I’ve known about The Point for as long as I can remember. It’s always been there. When I was a lot younger and we’d drive into MK at night, we’d always look out for the glowing red beacon in the shape of a pyramid on the horizon. It’s an iconic and even historic to Milton Keynes building, and it’s a shame to see that it’s just being left to become a shadow of its former self. I mean it surely wouldn’t cost much to put some led lights on it and light it up at night time again. So much money is wasted elsewhere in the city they should think about the upkeep of the actual landmarks they have.

Bobby D – Local Guide

Carlton Theatre – Hull

Posted on August 8, 2021 by modernmoocher

470-476 Anlaby Rd Hull HU3 6SH

Opened on 9th September 1928 with the silent film Lonesome Ladies.

The Carlton Picture Theatre in Anlaby Road was designed by the firm of Blackmore & Sykes and was built by Messrs. Greenwood and Sons.

It was run by Hull Picture Playhouse Ltd.

This was a lavish suburban cinema, with an elaborate green and gold sliding dome utilising Venetian glass and housing hundreds of concealled lights. Roman marble mosaics and painted plaster panels on the walls added to the sense of occasion engendered by a trip to the flicks.

A Fitton & Haley organ was installed, but this was later removed to the more central Cecil Theatre and was destroyed when that theatre was bombed during WW II.

The cinema had two entrances, one in each of the two towers on the front corners of the building. Above the proscenium was the inscription, rather inapt given how soon talkies arrived :

“A Picture is a poem without words”.

There was a single balcony and, for its date, a surprisingly large car park.

It continued unaltered, save for minor war damage, until its closure in April 1967, after which it was simply converted to bingo usage which continued as a Mecca Bingo Club until 2008.

Cinema Treasures

This is an immense and noble building, a once great single screen cinema.

Unluckily closed for some thirteen years, now looking neglected and forlorn.

Tinned up and awaiting an uncertain future, planning was applied for conversion to apartments, it was refused.

It is unlisted and unloved in need of friends and funds, who could operate a cinema and theatre in the manner of The Plaza in my hometown of Stockport.

The interior has been recorded by 28 Days Later.

We all deserve better.

The number of cinemas in Hull peaked at thirty six in 1938.

British film making flourished during the war years and cinema attendances were much higher, but by the end of the Second World War there were only twenty five – several had been bombed.

In 1964 competition from radio and television, and latterly bingo, reduced the number of cinemas to ten.

Now there are four.

A Taste Of Honey

Posted on April 17, 2020April 17, 2020 by modernmoocher

This is a film that has stayed with me for most of my life – first seen as a nipper, fascinated by the fact that it was shot in a very familiar landscape.

As years have passed I have watched and rewatched it, finally resolving to track down the local locations used in its filming.

Studying and pausing the DVD, making thumbnail sketches of frames, researching online – referring to Reelstreets.

I have previously written about the way in which the movie shaped a particular image of the North.

And examined particular areas of Manchester such as Barmouth Street.

The film generated world wide attention and remains just as popular today.

Still watched, still loved, still relevant – here are a selection of photographs I took in 2011 – cycling around Manchester, Salford and just a little closer to home in Stockport.

Larkhill Road scene of the moonlight flit

The descent from Larkhill Road

Stockport Viaduct

Stockport Parish Church

Stockport running for the bus to Castleton

Midway Longsight – where Dora Bryan sang

Barmouth Street were the school scenes were filmed.

Timpson’s shoe shop now demolished opposite the Etihad

Phillips Park the back of the gas works in Holt Town

The Devil’s Steps Holt Town

Rochdale Canal

Ashton Canal

All Souls Church Every Street Ancoats

Piccadilly Gardens as we view the city from a moving bus.

Manchester Art gallery – where they watched the Whit Walks.

Albert Square part of the earlier bus ride.

Trafford Swing Bridge

Dock Offices

Chimney Pot Park Salford

Pendleton

Barton Aqueduct

Through my tour I have attempted to capture a sense of the settings as they are – how, if at all, the areas have changed.

There may be some minor inaccuracies or omissions which I am happy to amend.

You may wish to visit the sites yourselves, the majority of which are easily accessible, above all watch the film and appreciate that which is around you.

Portrait of Shelagh Delaney – Arnold Newman

Sandown Court – Southport

Posted on December 31, 2019December 31, 2019 by modernmoocher

I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.

Where better to lay your weary head than Southport’s Sandown Court?

Longing for languorous days, gazing out at the distant sea, from the window of your fourteenth floor flat.

What’s Good for the Goose – is worth a gander.

My extensive research shows the flats were a location for the Norman Wisdom film, a saucy serving of seaside slap and tickle.

Conveniently situated twixt shore and traffic island – offering extensive accommodation for the discerning tenant.

Balconies clad with cast concrete abstracted panels, attractive dolphin-based water feature.

What more could you ask for?

Barmouth Street – Bradford Manchester

Posted on February 11, 2017April 10, 2019 by modernmoocher

Once again I am following in the footsteps of Rita Tushinghan and the Taste of Honey film crew, this time my research has lead me to Barmouth Street, Manchester.

To the east of the city centre, Bradford Park School was the scene of the opening scene, Jo’s netball match. The school is now long gone, now the site of a much enlarged public park, as can be seen from the map above.

Shelagh Delaney, author of the original play on which the film was based, can be seen fleetingly in this opening scene, appearing momentarily over the games teacher’s shoulder.

I have found one archive image of the school, as the scholars prepare for the annual Whit Walks, this along with many other community traditions and conventions, have all but disappeared from the streets of the city.

This was once a tight knit community, surrounded by industry, full employment and a short lived period of post-war growth and optimism.

A corner shop on very corner, though by the time I worked as a Mothers Pride van lad in the late sixties, many were already on their last legs. A lethal cocktail of closing factories, incipient supermarkets, and an urban renewal programme, which lead to slum clearance, would change the character of the area forever.

I am indebted to the photographic work of T Brooks who seems to have spent much of the mid Sixties documenting the streets, his pictures are now kept here in the Manchester Image Archives. Sadly I have found no further reference to him or his images, but have nothing but admiration for all those who pass unnoticed amongst us, camera forever poised.

Central to the social and sanitary life of that that community were the Barmouth Street Baths and Washhouse, where citizens would swim, wash, dry, iron, chat convivially, and surprisingly – play bowls.

Now long gone, along with the provision of local authority nursery care. There were similar low level pre-fabricated buildings dotted all over the city. Built quickly and cheaply, to provide for a growing population, of largely working-class families, with no shortage of work opportunities.

This was a time of great social change, a time which the film attempts to anticipate -a more diverse, and hopefully more tolerant time, a time of possibilities and opportunities for all.

A Taste of the North

Posted on February 7, 2017October 13, 2020 by modernmoocher

Where is the North and what does it look like?

It’s up there somewhere isn’t it, a dark elsewhere, a mythological other place.

I was curious, searching for clues.

I began in a nearby place in a faraway time, my first reference point, the film adaptation of Shelagh Delaney’s play A Taste of Honey.

Set in Salford by Salford born teenager Shelagh.

A teenager becomes pregnant by a black sailor. She leaves her feckless mother and her flashy new boyfriend to set up her own home. She moves in with a young gay man, who helps look after her as she faces an uncertain future.

I have compiled a series of photographs of the film’s locations.

The film’s release in 1962 broke new ground in terms of its matter of fact depiction of contentious and sensational subject matter. My interest in this instance rests with the visual image of the North that it created.

Larkhill Road Edgeley Stockport

Shot almost entirely on location in black and white by cinematographer Walter Lassally, we are treated to dark treeless vistas, cobbled streets, industrial areas almost perpetually in decline, bleak canals and terraced homes.

As shown in these archive images of the 1950s, illustrating locations that would subsequently be used in the film adaptation.

There is a comprehensive list of locations here at Reel Streets

Cambrian Street Holt Town Manchester

Phillips Park Gasworks Manchester

Director Tony Richardson was a product of the British Free Cinema movement, which had previously produced short, sharp documentary and drama work, driven by a leftist outlook and using a restless, immediate approach, aided by the new lightweight cameras and faster film stocks. This is an ethos and methodology that would be carried over into the feature productions of the Woodfall Films company.

Rochdale Canal Manchester

The film was shot in the flat, low, even light of the Winter which heightened the mildly desolate character of the landscape, though ostensibly Salford set many of the locations are in nearby Manchester and Stockport. An early long and free flowing title sequence and establishing shot, is a bus tour around Central Manchester, a city centre which at the time was still graced by a thick accumulation of dark industrial emissions and miasma.

A soot blackened Queen Victoria mute and imperious in Piccadilly Gardens, the freshly blooming cranes of post-war renewal tentatively appearing in the background.

The skyline punctuated by factory chimneys, the tight huddled streets of terraced houses chuffing billowing great grey clouds of smoke – a view familiar in the work of LS Lowry.

Barton Bridge

Trafford Swing Bridge

Stockport Rail Viaduct

Phillips Park Gasworks

The location of the home that Jo sets up was ironically the stage set workshop of the Royal Court Theatre (the very theatre where the play was developed and produced) in London – that most northern of cities.

There is a brief respite from this milieu, through a picture in picture sequence based on the image of a suburban bungalow – which along with the coming age of mass motor car ownership, offers the promise of escape.

A giddy day trip to Blackpool represents the temporary release from a contrasting and constricting world, a trip which for Jo emphasises the divide between Mother and her lover.

So we the viewers are left with a cloudily clear, black and white world, a pervasive construct that the North and Manchester is eagerly beginning to casually shuffle off.

Where streets are no longer paved with Eccles Cakes and whippets are hip.

Identity through landscape and location can both define and constrain, but that landscape, its representation, and the identity that it produces are all mutually mutable.

Take some time to watch and rewatch the film, freeze frame where are we?

Who are you?