Mecca Bingo Club

Former Gaumont cinema, built in 1936-7 for the Gaumont-British Picture Corporation on Bishopsford Road, Sutton. The architect was Harry Weston of Epsom and London, with interiors designed by Eugene Mollo and Michael Egan of London.

The building is constructed of brick with a steel frame, the upper façade clad in Binfield hand-made sand-faced russet bricks with painted artificial stone features. Brick return walls are visible, though the roof cannot be seen. The interior contains a large double-height auditorium with a balcony and stage, the latter equipped with a shallow fly-tower.

The exterior presents a monumental and symmetrical moderne façade. The ground floor, treated as a plinth and finished in terrazzo (now painted over), contains four sets of entrance doors beneath a canopy. The first floor features tall triple-light windows divided by painted pilasters, a configuration repeated on the upper storey with windows flanking the central feature and bullnosed corners to the façade. Semi-glazed doors to the café survive behind late twentieth-century protective panels.

The interior is dominated by a dramatic double-height auditorium featuring five huge fibrous plaster fluted coves, originally designed for indirect lighting. These coves are inclined towards the proscenium and extend across the ceiling and down into slanting troughs of fibrous plaster set in the side walls. The coves flanking the proscenium are cut short at the top to allow for ventilation grilles, now blocked. A further panel of ventilation grilles is integrated into the fluted cove over the stage. The proscenium's vertical sides are formed as bull-nosed tapering pilasters. The balcony front curves and inclines backwards. The dado survives on the side walls near the proscenium. Above the rear balcony, a raised central ceiling section accommodates the projection throw, with the rear wall retaining vertical battens and fibrous acoustic covering alongside projection ports. Two vomitory entrances to the balcony are accessed via dog-leg passages. The balcony soffit contains eight lighting saucer domes equipped with chromium and glass uplighters, while the balcony foyer features a fluted horizontal lighting cove. In the former café, moderne fibrous plaster decoration survives above a false ceiling, including saucer domes and coving, with original doors at first floor level.

The cinema was built to serve the London County Council's new St Helier estate and forms a cohesive group with adjoining flats and shops by Carl Rudolph Jelinek (1939-40). It represents a particularly dramatic and now rare example of a moderne cinema interior, designed as an architecture based on hidden lighting and executed in the fibrous plaster typical of the period.