Why I won’t mourn the death of the cinema

You could smell the stale popcorn and rancid carpet from the other end of the high street but that unmistakable Odeon odour always set my pulse racing. That was before we lost the vast art deco interior to corporate greed and short sightedness. The carving up of the beautifully ornate auditorium into three miniscule screens ruined the ‘going to the pictures’ experience. It became a sad portent of things to come. 

A couple of years after the needless vandalism, not one but two hangar-sized multiplexes landed on the outskirts of town rendering the old inner-city Odeon obsolete. For several years, my beloved fleapit stood like a towering 1930s headstone to a lost era. OK, so the place may have reeked of terminal decline, but the building itself added some much needed glamour to our gloomy little provincial town. My mother would always make an effort to dress up even when we were on our way to see some schlocky 80s horror movie.