Queen's Picture Palace

Jupiter Street was also the base for The Potteries Transport and Cinema Supply Company, which, with its fleet of navy blue Thames Trader lorries, delivered films picked up at the film companies in Birmingham to 68 cinemas across South Cheshire and North Staffordshire, as well as picking the films up after the last run and taking them back to Birmingham. When I started work as a projectionist in 1962, this was still a huge undertaking. But gradually, the cinemas closed one after the other and the company no longer had the work to keep the company viable. By the late 1970s, they appear to have gone and were replaced by a white transit van belonging to the Film Transport Service, who delivered films to the by then very small number of cinemas that were still open. Only three or four by that time out of some 35 that once flourished across the area.