Electric Palace Cinema, Harwich
The Electric Palace cinema, Harwich, is one of the oldest purpose-built cinemas to survive complete with its silent screen, original projection room and ornamental frontage still intact. It was designed by the architect Harold Ridley Hooper of Ipswich, Suffolk and opened on 29 November 1911.
Other interesting features include an open plan entrance lobby complete with paybox, and a small stage plus dressing rooms although the latter are now unusable. The original Crossley gas engine, which provided, in conjunction with a 100V DC generator, the electricity for the "Electric" Palace until 1925 is also still present. Unfortunately it is neither practical to restore, or remove, this engine.
The cinema closed in 1956 after being damaged in the 1953 East Coast floods, but re-opened in 1981, retaining the original screen, projection room and frontage as well as much of the original interior. It is now a community cinema and until 2006, when a Wednesday screening programme was introduced, films were shown at weekends only. The building also hosts regular jazz concerts.
The cinema is a Grade II* listed building and in 2009 was removed from the Buildings At Risk Register maintained by English Heritage following structural refurbishment, the completion of which, was celebrated on 15 July 2009.
In November 2006, British actor Clive Owen became patron of the cinema and at his first official visit he helped launch an appeal to raise funds to repair this historic building.
Read more about Electric Palace Cinema, Harwich: Patrons of The Electric Palace, Entertainment At The Palace, Community, Palace Digital Fund, Famous Visitors To The Cinema
Famous quotes containing the words electric and/or palace:
“A sociosphere of contact, control, persuasion and dissuasion, of exhibitions of inhibitions in massive or homeopathic doses...: this is obscenity. All structures turned inside out and exhibited, all operations rendered visible. In America this goes all the way from the bewildering network of aerial telephone and electric wires ... to the concrete multiplication of all the bodily functions in the home, the litany of ingredients on the tiniest can of food, the exhibition of income or IQ.”
—Jean Baudrillard (b. 1929)
“It takes a heap o’ children to make a home that’s true,
And home can be a palace grand, or just a plain, old shoe;
But if it has a mother dear, and a good old dad or two,
Why, that’s the sort of good old home for good old me and you.”
—Louis Untermeyer (1885–1977)