Lost Cinemas of Sunderland - watch it on Shots!TV - video Dailymotion

Sunderland Echo

Sunderland Echo reporter Tony Gillan takes us on a tour of the sites of some of Wearside's lost picture houses. See it at www.shotstv.com/watch/vod/52109130/sunderlands-lost-cinemas-remembered

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00:00 Going to the pictures, at least once a week, used to be the main form of entertainment

00:04 for waysiders. There was a time when Sunderland's town centre had a cinema on practically every

00:09 corner. This building in Holmeside was first opened in 1932 as Black's Regal Cinema. Inside

00:15 it still has what the Cinema Theatre Association describes as "the finest surviving cinema

00:20 auditorium in the North East". Picture houses were so common back in the day that here in

00:24 Monkway Mouth there were a couple of them just 300 feet apart. They were the Roker and the Coran.

00:30 It was perhaps one of the first Sunderland cinemas to be known fondly among locals as

00:34 "The Flea Pit". At least one rater of the Sunderland Egle has assured us that queues

00:38 for the original Star Wars in 1977 went round the building at least twice. Following an

00:43 extraordinarily long intermission, the Grand has set the regime life as a cinema in its new home

00:48 as part of Beamish's 1950s town.

00:55 [BLANK_AUDIO]

Lost Cinemas of Sunderland - watch it on Shots!TV

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