Mecca Bingo Club

Mecca Bingo Club

This former cinema, originally opened as the Ritz in November 1940, was constructed between 1939 and 1940 for the Lou Morris circuit. The architect was E. Hamilton Parke and the builders were Offer & Son, though the cinema had been planned some three years before construction began. Built on an awkward triangular site, it is one of the last cinemas to open from the classic era of cinema construction spanning the 1920s and 1930s.

The building is constructed in brown facing brick with concrete and white plaster dressings. It comprises a large auditorium with a flat-pitched roof and a lower foyer block to its left. The side and rear elevations, which were not intended to be visible from the street, remain unadorned and feature various exit doors and windows serving hallways, administrative offices and lavatories. A low fly-tower rises at the rear, with a full-height extension housing the ventilation plant and a slender chimney above.

The exterior displays streamlined Moderne style. The foyer block features a bulbous D-shaped end with a wide entrance containing late twentieth-century glazed double doors beneath a canopy. Above is a broad window with metal glazing bars dividing it into square panes, topped by a plaster fluted frieze that continues around the bulbous end. A wide over-sailing concrete cornice runs across the top. A low square tower rises above the junction with the auditorium, similarly detailed with brick and a narrower over-sailing concrete cornice. The tower face bears the lettering marking the cinema's original name, RITZ. The long auditorium street wall is relieved by brick pilasters topped with rounded concrete shelf-like features.

The interior contains a foyer with curving stairs on the left ascending to the balcony level, featuring solid balustrades and a chromium handrail. The upper foyer has an ornamented cornice based on the cyma recta moulding, repeated three times. The large double-height auditorium features a proscenium with fluted vertical members and a curving top moulding enlivened with random incised decoration. This extends either side to the ante-proscenium, then reverses and descends to dado level, paralleling the lower part of the vertical members. The reserve within these sinuous mouldings is filled with Art Deco openwork gilded fibrous plaster formed as wheatsheafs, foliage and flowers, masking ventilation outlets. A gilded scalloped cornice runs around, with the ceiling having a series of curving mouldings in the form of shells and scallops. The balcony cornice features the tripled cyma recta moulding, an undulating lighting cove and bands of horizontal plaster fluting. The balcony has two vomitory entrances, with ventilation panels covered by further Art Deco plaster foliage in the ceiling at the rear wall.

Externally, this is an impressive example of a streamlined Moderne super cinema of the late 1930s, displaying good massing and showing the influence of the Odeon style. Internally, the decoration represents a move into a Baroque form of Moderne which, unlike in the United States, never properly developed in Britain. The fine quality fibrous plaster decoration displays a surrealist flavour, possibly produced by the firm of Eugene Mollo. The cinema's plan is notably lucid despite the awkward triangular site.