Cinema

Cinema

This cinema was designed by Royal Engineer Lieutenant J.G.N. Clift for the Air Ministry's Directorate of Works (Drawing No. 608/18). It is constructed with large brick buttresses and reinforced 9-inch and 4.5-inch brick walling, externally coated with painted ironite and cement. The roof is Welsh slate over the front porch block and felt over the main block.

The building comprises two main parts. The front-of-house is a two-storey structure containing a transformer room, office with staircase, and two vestibules on the ground floor, with a projection room, rewinding room, and store on the first floor. The main auditorium occupies the rear portion and includes a stage and two retiring rooms. Squash courts are located in a lower flat-roofed block to the rear.

The south-west front features a porch set against a blank gable wall flanked by offset buttresses. The brick copings to the gable are swept up to meet at the apex a segmental-pedimented aedicule with a central semicircular arched niche and flanking scrolled brackets. The pedimented porch has brackets to deep eaves, with red tile dressings and timber casements to a Diocletian window in the tympanum. Below are recessed bays: three bays to the front and single bays to the returns, articulated by brick pilasters. A 4-light timber casement is set in a tall central brick panel, flanked by single lights above double-leaf doors with bracketed flat hoods. Similar casements appear in dormers. Small flat-roofed flanking extensions date from the mid-20th century. The 8-bay return elevations to the auditorium have offset buttresses rising to deep bracketed eaves with steel casements at upper level, a large timber ventilator to the centre of the auditorium roof, and similar treatment to the rear gable. The rear houses flat-roofed squash courts.

The interior auditorium features a modillion cornice with deep coving swept up to a ceiling with central rose beneath the ventilator. The proscenium has Tuscan pilasters to an acanthus cornice, with the entablature supported by wreathed brackets. A stick baluster stair serves a viewing gallery in the squash courts. The roof is steel-framed.

Hillingdon House and its estate at Uxbridge were acquired by the Government in early 1915. The Royal Flying Corps' Armament School took up residence in December 1917 after the site's use as a hospital for Canadian troops. This building represents the most impressive structure erected for the RAF's Armament School, which relocated from Perivale to Uxbridge in January 1918, shortly before the formation of the RAF in April that year. By this time, over 1,200 cadets per month were passing through Uxbridge, where personnel were trained in aerial gunnery and armaments. The new building programme emphasised the role of sport and recreation—including inter-unit fixtures, film shows, concerts, and theatre—in sustaining camp morale. During the inter-war period, the site's principal function was recruit training, with barracks erected around an extensive parade ground in 1928.

Clift's original design featured a Mansard-type roof similar to his officers' quarters design elsewhere at Uxbridge.