Abc Cinema

Cinema, formerly with ballroom and restaurant, now respectively offices and public house. Built in 1920-1 as the Whiteladies Picture House by Bristol architects James Henry LaTrobe and Thomas Henry Weston. The building incorporates a mid nineteenth-century terraced house of rock-faced Pennant stone with ashlar dressings and twentieth-century pantiled roof.

The cinema is constructed of limestone ashlar and render. The principal feature is a striking corner tower accessed from the foyer. The entrance has a curving Ionic tetrastyle portico. Over the foyer a square tower rises to corner corbels supporting grotesque masks. Above this is an octagon with panels extending down on two sides bearing the raised inscription WHITELADIES PICTURE HOUSE. The two corresponding panels facing away from the street are left blank. The four other angles of the octagon have regularly spaced mushroom-shaped piercings resembling a belfry. The tower is capped by a dome with a rope moulding around its base, surmounted by a cupola and finial. Access to the tower is gained by a door from a roof terrace over the foyer.

The main front has long vertical windows at first floor level, and the return wall has windows at second floor level. The foyer block return wall features an exit door to the street, two windows at mezzanine level, four round windows for the first floor, and a parapet with small roundels. The auditorium wall is enlivened by symmetrical pylons of giant sunken panels and three winged wreaths supporting sunken panels with lattice decoration, separated by triglyphs surmounted by double scrolls under a moulded cornice. The rear wall is left as unadorned render.

Four steps (originally described as Sicilian marble) lead up to the cinema entrance. The two pairs of entrance doors are partially glazed with fine inlaid wood veneer. The reused nineteenth-century terrace house has two gable projections to the left, one with a Venetian window and balcony. Its ashlar dressings have the character of early seventeenth-century strapwork.

Interior: The foyer retains plaster acanthus cornice decoration above the false ceiling, though otherwise altered. The large auditorium with gallery along the street facade has been subdivided into three cinemas. Two small cinemas were created from the rear stalls, where decorative plasterwork survives in the ceilings. The balcony has been extended forward to make a third cinema, with a barrel ceiling surviving, decorated with baroque plaster fields outlined in egg and dart, panels of latticework and Greek key mouldings. At the back the ceiling is higher with decorative spandrels to accommodate the projection room behind the curving rear wall. Two vomitories provide access. A sloping emergency exit passage has a terrazzo floor. Behind the present screens, original plaster decoration survives in the form of tall panels decorated with plasterwork ovals, foliage and false balconies, separated by elaborately moulded consoles supporting a cornice. The ceiling features plaster decoration in the form of a roundel surrounded by semicircles and honeysuckle. The curved proscenium introduced in 1959 also survives. The interiors of the former ballroom and restaurant are no longer of special interest.

The building represents an elaborate cinema complex of the post-First World War period. Whilst the interior has suffered alteration, significant quantities of good plasterwork survive, conveying a sense of grandeur greater than found in pre-1914 cinemas. Of particular note is the exterior treatment, with the eye-catching tower and extraordinary neo-Grec plaster decoration on the return wall. The tower is a late but prominent contribution to Bristol Art Nouveau, exemplified in other listed buildings in the city.