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Campbeltown Picture House planning for spectacular return

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TPH with signage

Amongst its magnificently consistent built heritage, with 150 listed buildings, Campbeltown’s A-listed Picture House had its centenary last year, 2013. It is one of the few early purpose-built cinemas in Scotland still showing films.

It is the only cinema in Scotland which retains what was called the ‘atmospheric style’ dec0ration. This relates to the two different little ‘houses’ at ether side of the screen, in the position of theatre boxes. These were added in the remodelling of the interior in 1935 when the atmospheric style was modish, born of the notion that the ‘little houses’ made people feel as if they were sitting outdoors watching a drama unfold before them.

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The little red roofed one on the right [which seems to echo the Picture House building itself] could actually be a cinema box. You can get into it through the manager’s office in the backstairs part of the building – and, lifting the curtains behind its windows offers a view of the auditorium that feels curiously secretive. There is space behind the castellated ‘house’ on the left as well,. but its windows are less conducive to acting as a ‘box’.

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The auditorium of The Picture House is also one of the few cinema buildings anywhere than remains undivided, with the stalls and the balcony above together offering seats for the same film.

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The regeneration challenge

Campbeltown Community Business, which owns and is working to restore and upgrade the glorious 1913 Picture House on the waterfront, has recently had to take a hard decision – but one which has the best chance of issuing into a sustainable future this important – and joyful – support for community and business life in the town.

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As scrutiny revealed ever more work needed by the building in addition to repairs – like sound proofing and insulation; and as the cinema’s old boiler became increasingly unable in the approaches to winter, the issue became one of whether or not to keep on running the cinema in its current condition.

It’s about the art of the possible. The demands of preparing major funding applications to raise money at the level the work on the Picture House requires add up to a complex and carnivorous business. This needs all sorts of interim reports with a depth of detail  – and full final applications for a variety of agencies with a wide range of expectations – and different submission deadlines.

Had the Community Business decided to carry on operating the cinema, it would have incurred the very real risk of being unable to develop and deliver the necessary calibre and robustness of the vital funding submissions – and the cinema would have continued to cost, just to keep it open.

SONY DSCAs a group of volunteers in a company with charitable status and as dedicated as they have been proven to be – continuing to walk the tight rope between acting as an operating company and acting as a development company was likely to see them fall off the wire and succeed in neither.

So, with the winter almost upon them, the period of shrinking audiences and much higher running costs in an uninsulated thinly-walled historic building with a dodgy boiler and high fuel costs triggered the common sense realisation that there was only one decision to be taken.

The cinema was recently closed for the duration of the period necessary to persist in working with the funding bodies, submitting the funding applications, battling through to the success they are determined to achieve. When – and it is when – that is done, there will be the physical work of restoration and construction, with the technical and electrical  upgrading and the fitting out.

After that, Campbeltown will have a unique, capable and flexible cinema to support community and corporate life in the town and add to its attraction for visitors. It will marry the most modern cinematic technology with a restored  and developed building important in the world of cinema at an international level  – and with a second screen, a cafe and ticketing facility, new and more extensive lavatories – and undercover access to the cinema in bad weather.

The upstream potential

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The addition of a second and smaller screening venue – to be built on to the back of the main building, out into the asset that make this sustainable future possible, the large courtyard at the rear – will add a great deal to the service and the earning capacity of the cinema. This is not only about running two films simultaneuosly. It enables special events based on film  to be run in either of the screening venues while the film programme is run in the other. This might be, for example:

  • screening a live opera, ballet or theatre event from one of the metropolitan venues in one auditorium – and the cinema has already and successfully been screening such live events;
  • screening a special interest film in one venue for a commissioned audience [and how many films featuring golf can we come up with between us? Jane Mayo, Chair of Campbeltown Community Business, offers Goldfinger as the first putt.]; with a normal feature film in the other;
  • collaborating with hotels in the town or the Town Hall or MOKrun and the Mull of Kintyre Music festioval to offer special screenings as part of a promotional weekend initiative or to support a special event;
  • running an in-house film festival.

New lavatories conveniently located between the current auditorium and the new smaller one to be built on in the rear courtyard, will civilise the facility and enhance the sound barrier between the two screens.

Transforming the little, later, annexe of the cinema known as The Byre, at the front to the right of the main building and separated from it by an alley through to the courtyard – into a ticketing facility and with a small cafe, with direct covered access to the cinema, will make it much more congenial to visit in bad weather or when demand means long queues.

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The back half of the annexe as it stands [not shown above], was added to it and will be removed; with this original front section extended to create a usable cafe.

A second staircase in the cinema itself, from the ground floor to the balcony – where the current fire escape stair is located – will speed access to seats and make sales and movement during intervals more efficient.

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The little oval projection room, up in the narrow oval bubble above the main roof, below and redolent, above, with the history of cinematography, will be refocused purely on digital projection.

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The stage in front of the screen in the main auditorium was enlarged and will be reduced – but still kept bigger than the original to facilitate the hosting of occasional other events, as with Mull Theatre’s successful productions.

A lighting designer has visited the cinema and has already started to consider the design of appropriate lighting in the auditorium to fit in with the general decision taken and supposed by the funding agencies – to restore the interior of the building to the 1930s aesthetic of the cinema it had acquired, with appropriately styled modern products.

The plan is then to run an annual festival of 1930s films as part of the programme.

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Original artefacts – like the clock, with its stylistic characteristics of the 1930s art deco style of the remodelling of the interior – have been safely put away until the reconstruction is complete.

The team of consultants now working with the Community Business are hugely experienced, individually respected, committed to the project and, according to Jane Mayo, the business’s Chair, inspirational. The knowledge and perspectives they have brought to the dedicated volunteer team that have persistently driven this regeneration project forwards has been an in-air refuelling system they value hugely. They are:

  • Ron Inglis, former CEO of Regional Screen Scotland, is Project Manager, overseeing a team of professionals with long experiences working in the industry.
  • Robert Livingston, former leader of HiArts, is Organisational Development Consultant.
  • Burrell Foley Fischer are the London-based Conservation Architects – with Stefanie Fischer and Faye Davies specific major asset.
  • Paul Duffy is Heritage Activities Consultant.
  • Rob Arthur of Thurso Cinemas has been interim manager , leaving a legacy of programming strategy and staff training.

The project now needs Campbetown to understand that all the help they can continue to give in donations and fund raising will help to get the delightful and important facility through its mothballing period, without incurring any more damage – ready for the point when the major work to let it burst into exuberant new life can get going.

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The Glasgow influence – and the possibilities today

The cinema was built at the instigation of and with funding from a syndicate of local businessmen, merchants who had made their fortunes through the burgeoning city of Glasgow – reached by steamer and in Campbeltown, then a prosperous major town whose commercial heart beat in its busy port.

The well-found merchants began to build mansions in the town, influenced by the houses they saw their peers establish in Glasgow. In their view, Campbeltown – and they – had to have the best and what was good enough for Glasgow was a reasonable benchmark for their won ambitions. Many brought in the fashionable Glasgow architects of the day to contribute to the great Victorian private houses on the edge of town, tiered on the sloping hillside at Askomil on the north shores of Campbeltown Loch.

Glasgow enthusiastically adopted the cinema at an early stage in the genre and, again, what Glasgow had drove the ambitions of the local merchants determined to put their self-confident town on a level with the best.

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In came The Picture House, designed by the eminent cinema architect with a sense of imagination in the cinemas he created, Albert Victor Gardner, a Gloucestershire man who had trained at Glasgow School of Art and practiced out of Bath Street. It was also first managed by the best of the day, F Randall Burnett, an English entrepreneur who had quickly seen the attraction of cinema and who ran a chain of them across the northern part of the island of Britain.

There is an ironic historical note in the literature on The Picture House produced by the Community Business, when Burnett – well aware of the commercial value of publicity attracted by personal flamboyance, overcame a landslide at Argyll infamous [and spectacular] Rest and Be Thankful – by simply driving over the top of it.Picture House 1913 sepia2 copy

The Picture House was built on the waterfront because that was the focus of the commercial activity of the town. It was built on reclaimed land which, as it settled, created some of the physical consequences the restoration will address. Gardner’s original building, above, also did not feature the glassed in entrance and the upper balcony lobby of today. These were later practical modifications to the original, as seen below.

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The cinema building has a commanding position only really understood form inside. If you stand in the front-facing lobby of the balcony, above, you could be on the bridge of a ship, with a sweeping view through and above the cabbage palms that identify the microclimate and the period of the town. This view simply colonises the harbour and the entirety of Campbeltown Loch, with the visceral tug of the signature Davaar island at its entrance.

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All of this adds up to a story which makes The Picture House emblematic of the founding ambitions of Campbeltown – to be the best, to work for the best and to celebrate being the best.

The regeneration of this celebratory flourish of a building on its important waterfront, with the harbour now assuming a new commercial life, is a prompt for the town as a whole to complete the job it has clearly begun, in re-assuming its self-belief and putting its collective back into making Campbeltown the place to be.

The influence of the city of Glasgow at its greatest, known and seen in Campbeltown, is the basis of a mutually attractive approach that could be made to Glasgow City Council in a formal ‘adoption’ of Campbeltown that would see the town given a place in the famously energetic public relations of that city. This would lend the sort of profile Campbeltown and Kintyre  could not get any other way – and to a massive audience within reach.

And might the ever-enterprising West Coast Motors, the long established family transport business head-quartered in Cmpbeltown, make another of its  adventurous and canny steps?

The company has already taken to water transport through its subsidiary Kintyre Express, the fast small passenger ferry service that has forged unexpected new links between Campbeltown and the north coast of Northern Ireland. It has a wide spectrum of coach-based businesses operating in and out of Glasgow, from the carnivalesque open-topper sightseeing buses to running services for Scottish Citylink alongside its own network of daily services in and around the city.

What about West Coast Air – a modest airbus shuttling frequently between Campbeltown and Glasgow, with low fares making it the transport of choice, linking direct from and to the international hub that is Glasgow Airport in 30 minutes; and with fast access already available [and due to be improved with a rail link] to and from the city of Glasgow itself?

Why should the Scottish Government not put Road Equivalent Fares [RET] subsidies on air routes to places like Campbletown that are never going to be serviced year round by major ferries from anywhere?

All of this and more CAN be done and Campbeltown was born of thinking big.

Note: The photograph at the start of ‘The Regeneration Challenge’ section is by  Sarah Macdonald at Sarah MacDonald Photography. The photograph of the clock and the digitally remastered image of the 1913 facade one are by KR Carroll, who was the cinema’s last projectionist. The image at the top of this piece is by BFF Architects.

 


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