Newcastle Picture House & Monument Movie

I recently bought an interesting book called "Cinemas of Newcastle" which describes and shows photographs of all of the old cinemas there used to be in Newcastle. I never realised that this HSBC bank building on Grey Street was once a cinema. It was converted from The Victoria Music Hall to "Newcastle Picture House" in 1914 and was described as the Tyneside's first "super cinema". In 1922 it became "Grey Street Picture House". However 1931, the huge Paramount cinema opened in 1931 on Pilgrim Street and the Picture House couldn't compete (It closed in 1933 and was for many years a furniture shop before becoming a bank). Paramount changed to Odeon in 1939 and was my favourite cinema as a child, sadly it closed in 2002 due to competition. The building has stood derelict for the past 12 years, which seems such a waste of a beautiful grand cinema.

I thought I'd blip the grand old Newcastle Picture House building next to the temporary cinema screen that stands in front of it for summer as part of "Monument Movies", where free movies are shown daily with deckchairs for people to sit in. My grandparents loved my old cinema s book and enjoyed pointing out the cinemas they used to visit whilst "courting". They told me that they used to queue over an hour to watch a film and even then, the movie was on a continuous loop meaning they often saw the end before the beginning. It was something special to go to the cinema then, wonder what they would have thought of all the people wandering past the outside movie screen paying no attention to it!