Dancehouse Theatre Including Numbers 6-14

Dancehouse Theatre, including numbers 6-14a Oxford Road, Manchester

A former cinema built in 1929-30 by the architectural firm Pendleton and Dickenson of Manchester for developer Emmanuel Nove. The building is constructed on a steel frame with a faience-clad façade and stock brick rear elevations, topped by a flat roof with gable ends and flat-pitched sides.

The principal façade is a four-storey classical composition clad in white faience, divided into nine bays. The ground floor contains shop units except for the central bay, which forms the theatre entrance beneath a projecting canopy. The first and second floor levels are separated by giant pilasters with stylised yellow faience Ionic capitals. Each bay contains six windows with mullion and transom glazing. Above the entrance, windows are separated by giant pilasters topped with lion-mask capitals. The cornice is ornamented with miniature arches. The subsidiary pilasters on the first floor and consoles on the second floor support the cornice across most bays. The third floor is set back behind a simple metal balustrade with cross-members and verticals. The central entrance bay rises to form an arched portico with a volute keystone and shaped pediment, bearing the letters EN (for Emmanuel Nove) on the top left and the date 1930 on the top right. The quadrant ends have elaborately decorated oval cartouche capitals on their central pilasters, and the second floor quadrant windows feature faience balustraded balconies. The rear elevation has large horizontal windows on the first floor and scattered smaller windows serving the main stairwell, hallways and lavatories. Art Deco folding metal gates were added at the entrance in 1992.

The original interior plan comprised two double-height auditoria set above first-floor restaurant and waiting halls, with a ground-floor foyer and shops. The foyer retains some original ceiling decoration and was refurbished in Art Deco style in 1992 with wall decoration inspired by details elsewhere in the building. A central staircase features a metal balustrade with rising sun and Greek fret decoration, partly original and partly renewed to the same pattern. An escape stair at the rear is set around a 1930s metal lift cage.

The surviving cinema auditorium occupies the second and third floor levels and contains substantial Art Deco plaster decoration with an undulating profile featuring attenuated fluted pilasters and broader ones in cascade or zig-zag Moderne forms. The ceiling is a flat barrel design divided into fields with plaster cruciform ventilation grilles. The second auditorium and first-floor spaces have been converted to offices and rehearsal rooms; although the wall decoration has been removed, the Art Deco cruciform plaster ventilation grilles survive. The shop windows and interiors are not of special interest beyond their contribution to the formal façade composition.

The cinema was developed as a speculative venture by Emmanuel Nove, a housing estate developer, but opened as the Regal Twins under the management of Manchester Piccadilly Picture Theatre. It represents an early example of a multiple cinema complex, a type which became common only about forty years later following declining film attendance. The cinema operated until 1986 as the Cannon before conversion to the Dancehouse Theatre in 1992. The exterior faience composition is particularly handsome, while the surviving auditorium contains high-quality Art Deco plaster decoration in a rich idiom that was rare in Britain.