Regent Super Cinema

UKmender on November 10, 2020 at 8:58 am

To, hopefully, expand upon Ken’s comments, above, I will add my own two penn'th. As Ken says, this green and white, Spanish Colonial edifice was sited on Manchester’s main southerly arterial, Princess Road, on the very western edge of Fallowfield. Close to a main crossroads, it served not only the Wilbraham Road estate, but also a major part of Whalley Range, Withington and Alexander Park. Just around the corner, lived my mother’s parents. When she married, my father moved in with them and The Regent became their principal means of entertainment. In time, it also became the first cinema I ever visited as a child. Prior to that, on Sunday 18th August 1946, during the late-show, my mother, in the front stalls, went into labour. The show was temporarily stopped and an ambulance called. I was born early next morning, in the nearby Withington Hospital.

Unlike many cinemas, which needed external or internal steps, in order to reach the level of the rear stalls, The regent was built onto the side of an embankment. The land, at this point, had been built-up to provide a level running surface for the trams, which once ran down the centre of Princess Road on a wide, grassed, central reservation. The reservation remains. The trams are long gone. So, entering the cinema at ground level, you walked from the foyer directly into the rear stalls. The raked floor then followed the lie of the land, on down towards the stage. This eventuality must have reduced building costs dramatically. It also made for a relatively low frontal profile. In today’s world, it would also have been cosidered extremely wheelchair friendly.

When, around 1959, it became The Cresta, all the green-work of the facade was overpainted in blue. When it was closed, and eventually ‘demolished,’ I was able to observe the process from the top decks of the busses taking me to and from school in Wythenshawe. I put ‘demolished’ in inverted commas for the very good reason that it wasn’t so much demolished as converted; A bulldozer was employed to simply push the entire front end of the building down towards the exposed stage. The rear half of the building, complete with pent-roof and proscenium was left standing. For about a week the remains of the screen could be clearly seen, hanging in tatters. Fuel storage tanks were then set in place, the ‘hardcore’ levelled off, and the whole lot, seats and all, topped off with concrete. What happened then was that the remaining rear shell of the cinema had a grey, rectangular, corrugated, false facade erected over it, bearing a huge, red Pegasus. What remained of the original building had become the service garage for a Mobil filling station named The Cresta Court. A single island of pumps sat on the forecourt, parallel to the facade. Over time, that building was removed, the filling station has been completely re-modelled, twice, and the branding changed to BP. The site, however, has never been completely cleared. Much of the stalls and lower stage area, of The Regent cinema, remain encased beneath the filling station’s foundations.