Reading passage
In the high street of the seaside town of Westcombe stands a building that many visitors photograph: the Palace Cinema, which first opened its doors in 1928. With its tall front of white stone and its name in large red letters, the Palace was once the most modern building in the town. On Saturday nights in the 1930s, queues stretched down the street, and the nine hundred seats inside were almost always full.
At that time, going to the cinema was the most popular form of entertainment in Britain. In 1946, the best year ever recorded, more than 1,600 million tickets were sold across the country, and the average person went to the pictures thirty-three times a year. The Palace showed two films a week, and between the films there was often live music played on a large organ that rose up from the floor in front of the screen.
The arrival of television changed everything. From the 1950s onwards, families bought TV sets and stayed at home in the evening. Ticket sales across the country fell year after year, and hundreds of small cinemas closed. The Palace survived by cutting costs: the organ was sold, the balcony was closed, and the number of staff was reduced. Even so, by the early 1980s the cinema was losing money every month.
The final blow came in 1985, when a modern cinema with four screens opened just outside the town, next to a new shopping centre. The Palace could not compete with its comfortable seats and free parking. In March 1986, after fifty-eight years, the owners showed the last film, switched off the lights, and locked the doors. For the next fourteen years, the building stood empty, and rain came in through a broken roof.
The years of emptiness took their toll. Vandals broke windows, pigeons nested in the balcony, and the famous organ chamber filled with dust. At one point, a property company offered to buy the site and turn it into flats, and only a decision by the council to list the building as being of historical interest prevented its sale. That decision, made in 1998, gave local people the breathing space they needed to organise a rescue.
In 2000, a group of local people formed the Friends of the Palace, determined to save the building. They discovered that the structure was basically sound, although the roof, the heating and the electrical system all needed to be replaced. The total cost of repair was estimated at 2.2 million pounds. Raising such a sum seemed impossible for a small town, but the group refused to give up.
Money came from many directions. The national heritage fund provided a grant of 1.4 million pounds after the group showed that the Palace was one of the few cinemas of its period still standing. The local council gave 300,000 pounds, and the people of Westcombe raised the rest through concerts, sponsored events and a scheme that allowed supporters to buy a seat with their name on a small metal plate. More than six hundred seats were sold in this way.
The restored cinema reopened in 2008. Inside, visitors found the old beauty carefully brought back to life: the painted ceiling, the golden lights, and the red curtains around the screen. A new organ, built by volunteers over five years, now plays before evening shows on Fridays. The number of seats was reduced to four hundred, so every seat has more leg room than before.
Today, the Palace is run as a charity with a small paid staff and more than eighty volunteers, who sell tickets, serve ice cream, and show visitors to their seats. The programme mixes new films with classics from the past, and the cinema also hosts talks, school visits and an annual film festival in October. Last year, it welcomed 62,000 visitors, and ticket income covered about seventy per cent of its running costs.
The story of the Palace is not unique. Across Europe, old cinemas and theatres have been saved by local people who refused to let them disappear. Researchers say such buildings matter not only for what they show, but for what they mean: they are places where a community remembers its past. As the chairman of the Friends puts it, a town without its Palace would be like a family without its photographs.