Art Picture House

The following building shall be added:

SD 8010 SW KNOWSLEY STREET (north-west side) 326-/2/10025 Art Picture House

II

Former cinema, now bingo hall. 1921-2 by Albert Winstanley. Brick-clad steel frame with faience frontage. Slate and asphalt roof. Three-storey frontage to Knowsley Street masks full-height auditorium with gallery, boxes, stage and flytower. Faience frontage a symmetrical nine-bay composition, with three-bay centrepiece and single-bay end pavilions all under stepped pediments. Heavy cornice links these features, which have pilasters defining the bays. Round-arched central window rises through first and second floors under keystone; the round-arched motif repeated in the intervening bays over three-light windows. Frieze between first and second floors bears inscription to left: ART PICTURES and to right: ART CAFE. The facade a demonstration of post-Edwardian baroque done with much character. The ground floor simpler, with modern shop front to right not of special interest. The interior is richly decorated and theatrical in tone. Original round-arched proscenium with heavy modillion moulding and supported on paired pilasters - a rare survival. This encrustation of baroque motifs is repeated in the modillion eaves cornice running round the hall, the plaster ribs of the barrel-vaulted ceiling and its three ventilation roundels and rear dome, as in the intervening panels of the side walls set between moulded drops. Single balcony with curved front heavily decorated with cartouches and swags supported on columns with heavy cornice brackets. On each side of this balcony are two boxes with extended, rounded fronts between Ionic pilasters set forward of unmoulded square columns; groin vault over between upturned volutes and with keystones. Some original seating survives in circle. Circle reached via staircase with marble steps and gilded metal balustrade with 1920s-style Roman decoration. Large former first-floor cafe over entrance now lounge. Albert Winstanley had already converted a former baptist chapel on the same site as a cinema for the Bury Cinematograph Company in 1910-11. Included as one of the most elaborate and complete examples of an early 1920s cinema, still exceptionally theatrical in its plan and decoration. Source: Original plans held by Bury M B Archives.

Listing NGR: SD8034310591