The campaign to save the EMD cinema in Walthamstow, east London, is nothing new (the NS reported on it back in 2004) but it is vital that anyone wishing to add their signatures to the petition does so by the end of this month.
The McGuffin Film and Television Society (so named in honour of Alfred Hitchcock, born in nearby Leytonstone) has done a hardy job of highlighting the social and cultural loss that will befall this corner of London if the cinema, which is Grade II listed, is converted into a church by its current owners UCKG (United Church of the Kingdom of God). UCKG bought the building in 2003, following their acquisition of the Rainbow Theatre, the legendary former music venue in Finsbury Park, north London. Since then, the EMD has stood dormant, and was recently occupied by squatters. Images taken by the local MP Stella Creasy have shown the interior to be in a state of significant disrepair, contrary to the claims of UCKG.
A video filmed by torchlight inside the cinema was as difficult for me to watch as any horror movie. I have a sentimental attachment to the place — it was where I saw my first film, and countless subsequent ones. I was as happy there as a child as anywhere I have ever been, so it would not be overstating the case to say that seeing the dilapidated, water-damaged interior now is like witnessing the desecration of a childhood home.
The connection with the EMD, or the Granada as it was known when I used to go there, reach even further back in my family. My Italian grandmother, who still lives in nearby Chingford, used to visit the cinema most Monday evenings after she first arrived in London. She was in her early twenties and had left Italy to live in east London with her husband (my late grandfather) whom she had married when he was stationed in Grado during the Second World War. With only a few English phrases, and even fewer friends, these cinema visits served various purposes: they gave her a breather from looking after a young baby (my father), while the films helped improve her English vocabulary, and the social aspect brought her into contact with other Italian immigrants.
She looked after me a lot in the early years of my life, and it was in her company that I rode the few miles to Walthamstow on the upper deck of a Routemaster, and visited my first cinema. It couldn’t have been the movie we saw that hooked me — I was four years old, and it was a feature-length version of the ropey 1970s sitcom Man About the House, chosen simply because that was what happened to be on. More likely it was the Granada itself. The description on the McGuffin site brings the grandeur of the place back to me:
Flamboyant interior decorations by the world famous Russian director and designer Theodore Komisarjevsky … The cinema’s lavish interior was inspired by a trip to the grand Alhambra Palace in Spain, resulting in the Granada’s large foyer being designed in an elaborate 17th Century Baroque style with a marble floor and extravagant chandeliers while the main auditorium boasted colourful Moorish-inspired arches and grille-work. Sidney Bernstein [the cinema’s proprietor] insisted that the beautiful interior should be decorated with fresh flowers each day.
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Perhaps at the time I just thought that all cinemas were that swanky. Possibly the magnificence of the Granada didn’t hit me fully until I visited another local cinema, the slightly less impressive Woodford Majestic, which couldn’t boast chandeliers, or that expansive carpeted landing outside the Granada’s Screen 1 on its first floor, so ridiculously vast that Gatsby could have comfortably hosted an intimate shindig there. The Majestic certainly didn’t have fresh flowers in the lobby every day. Did anywhere?
The glory of the Granada was wrapped up for me in lots of other wonderful aspects of the cinemagoing experience — the unspoken, delicious naughtiness of being in the cinema in the afternoon, the picnics that my grandmother would prepare for us to share in the stalls (Spam and Salad Cream sandwiches, crunchy red apples, Golden Wonder crisps, orange squash that she would decant into glasses in the dark). We saw a lot of the Disney releases of the day and a good deal of inferior things I expect, but whatever we chose must have been immeasurably improved by where we were seeing it.
That still held true for the movies I saw at the Granada as I got older. It felt just right seeing Scorsese’s After Hours there on a grey Saturday afternoon, the building’s faded glamour all around me, and only two or three other people in the cinema. And I’m sure Scream, the last film I saw at the Granada (in 1997), was that bit scarier because I wasn’t sitting in one of the slick multiplexes which had begun springing up in the vicinity, but rather in a waning picture palace full of its own lingering ghosts.
My reason for turning on the faucet of nostalgia and giving it the full Alan Titchmarsh is not self-indulgence (well, not only self-indulgence) but rather to point out a truism with regard to the campaign to save the EMD: that cinemas situated in communities, unlike multiplexes out-of-town, are not merely buildings. They are focal points for those communities, repositories for our memories, bridges from the past into the future, monuments to the immediacy of film, and part of who we are as a society.
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