Cinemas might be closing across the UK but, as a new community group is proving, that doesn’t mean cinema culture has to end…
When Picturehouse announced its beautiful (and recently renovated) Bromley site was closing its doors earlier this year, the local community sprang into action.
Save Bromley Picturehouse was born – a group dedicated to trying to save not just the art-deco building itself, but the premise of a movie-loving community in the borough at all (you can read all about it in the new issue of Film Stories Magazine, on sale now).
Given just over a month’s notice before the cinema’s last day of operations, the chance that the venue could be saved in its current form was, according to organisers, always a slim one. But with hundreds of people finding a local community where none previously existed, chairman Rob Carrick and co are keen to create something positive out of something less so.
Now, the group’s aims have shifted. While maintaining Bromley’s iconic cinema space is still a very personal crusade for plenty of its new committee, Save Bromley Picturehouse has had a bit of a facelift: it’s now Arts Cinema Bromley (and has a nifty new logo to boot).
“Seeing [the site’s] commercial viability, we understood that Picturehouse had to close the branch,” Rob told Film Stories last week. “That’s bound to be related to the wider woes that we know are going on – I mean, we kind of know the future of the brand is uncertain anyway. But we were waiting until they closed their doors, until we until we wanted to do anything differently.”
Those “woes” refer to Picturehouse owner Cineworld, which is in the process of shutting down as many as 25 cinemas across the UK in a major restructuring plan. And Bromley isn’t the only Picturehouse site to close in recent weeks – both the Stratford East and Fulham Road branches screened their final films in July.
Arts Cinema Bromley, though, is determined that its own community won’t be tied to any individual building. Pitching itself as a dedicated space for film and culture lovers of all stripes in the area, its Facebook group already has 1,500 members keen to find out about its next steps.
“We want to create some kind of touring cinema that goes to different locations,” Rob says, “just to kind of get people interested and start to build some momentum. Hopefully, as the brand builds, it becomes more prominent for people as an alternative to what we have as the mainstream cinemas in in Bromley.”
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The committee’s first missions, though? Brand awareness, and building a membership offer. With planned appearances on podcasts and plenty of meetings lined up, both seem to be in full flow already. Taking lessons from other community cinema groups across the UK, there’s plenty that could go wrong – but just as much that’s already gone right.
“It feels as if there is a real appetite for this,” Rob adds. “There’s an awful lot of potential in a borough like Bromley to do something like this, because this doesn’t exist here. We might have lost the Picturehouse, we’ve lost that facility, but we’ve not lost that community.”
