Art Picture House

Former cinema, now a bingo hall, built in 1921-2 by Albert Winstanley. The building is a brick-clad steel frame structure with a faience front and a slate and asphalt roof. The three-storey front on Knowsley Street conceals a full-height auditorium with a gallery, boxes, stage, and flytower.

The faience frontage is a symmetrical nine-bay composition with a three-bay centrepiece and single-bay end pavilions, all topped with stepped pediments. A heavy cornice connects these elements, with pilasters defining the bays. A round-arched central window extends through the first and second floors, topped with a keystone, and the round-arched motif is repeated above the three-light windows in the other bays. A frieze between the first and second floors bears the inscription “ART PICTURES” to the left and “ART CAFE” to the right. The facade demonstrates a post-Edwardian baroque style with considerable character. The ground floor is simpler, with a modern shop front on the right that is not of special interest.

The interior is richly decorated and theatrical. A rare survival is the original round-arched proscenium, with a heavy modillion moulding and paired pilasters. This baroque ornamentation is repeated in the modillion eaves cornice around the hall, the plaster ribs of the barrel-vaulted ceiling and its three ventilation roundels and rear dome, as well as in the panels of the side walls between moulded drops. A single balcony has a heavily decorated curved front supported by columns with heavy cornice brackets. Two boxes are on either side of the balcony, with extended, rounded fronts between Ionic pilasters set forward of unmoulded square columns, with a groin vault over, upturned volutes, and keystones. Some original seating remains in the circle, which is reached by a staircase with marble steps and a gilded metal balustrade displaying 1920s-style Roman decoration. A large former first-floor cafe, above the entrance, now serves as a lounge.

Albert Winstanley had previously converted a former Baptist chapel on the same site into a cinema for the Bury Cinematograph Company in 1910-11. The building is included as one of the most elaborate and complete examples of an early 1920s cinema, still exceptionally theatrical in its plan and decoration. Original plans are held by Bury Metropolitan Borough Archives.