Introduction

Cinema-going was the most popular commercial leisure activity in the first half of the twentieth century. UK cinema attendance grew significantly in the Second World War and peaked in 1946 with 1.6 billion recorded admissions. Though ‘going to the pictures’ remained a popular pastime for the remainder of the 1940s, the transition from war to peacetime altered citizens’ leisure habits. During the 1950s, a range of factors including increased affluence, the growth of television ownership, population shifts and the diversification of leisure activities led to rapid declines in attendance. By 1965, admissions had plummeted to 327 million and the cinema held a far more marginal existence in the nation’s leisure habits. Many cinemas closed their doors and those that remained open increasingly competed with a range of venues including bingo halls, dance halls, bowling alleys, cafés and people’s homes. Cinema attendances fell in all regions, but the speed, nature and extent of this decline varied widely across the United Kingdom. By linking broad national developments to regional case studies of two similarly-sized industrial cities, Belfast and Sheffield, this book adds nuance and detail to our understanding of regional variations in film exhibition, audience habits and cinema-going experiences during a period of profound social and cultural change.

Over the past thirty years, many cinema historians have shifted their focus away from the aesthetic and textual analysis of a small number of canonical films towards an understanding of cinema as a cultural institution and cinema-going as a historically situated leisure practice located in specific geographical and temporal contexts.¹ The historical literature on cinemas and cinema-going has expanded greatly and scholars have used diverse methodologies to address a wide range of topics such as censorship, exhibition, distribution, film popularity, programming and reception. Proponents of new cinema history conceive cinema-going as ‘a social act performed by people of flesh and blood … situated within specific social, cultural, historical and spatial confines’.² In these studies, the places where people watched films and their experiences of cinema-going are as important as the films that were shown. More recently, new cinema history has witnessed a spatial turn as scholars have increasingly asked how geography and topography impacted on audiences and exhibition.³ In spite of this recent scholarship, further work is required to comprehensively understand the regional variations of UK cinema attendance, the heterogeneous nature of audiences and the ways that consumer tastes were shaped by local identities. In his 2003 article on the geography of cinema-going in Great Britain, Barry Doyle stated that while cinema historians had created a ‘clearer picture of the class, age and gender elements in the changing cinema audience’, the geography of cinema’s decline had not been fully investigated.⁴ This remains true, and the following analysis expands the geographical range of cinema-going studies, demonstrates the benefits of using detailed local case studies in cinema history research and shows that place was as significant a factor as age, class or gender in shaping the cinema-going experience.

Beginning at the end of the Second World War, this book builds upon Richard Farmer’s study of wartime cinemas and cinema-going. He demonstrated the profound impact that government regulations, wartime conditions, enemy bombing campaigns and the conscription of staff had on cinemas. He charted the growth in admissions throughout the Second World War, arguing that wartime cinema-going can only be understood with reference to wartime experiences.⁵ The upheaval of war also had an impact on the operation and profitability of post-war cinemas. On the same day that Germany offered its unconditional surrender to the Allies, the Belfast Telegraph commented that:

Payments for Entertainment Tax, film rentals, wages, utility bills, rates, advertising, rents and repairs all added to operating costs and cinemas had to generate large amounts of revenue to make ends meet.⁷ In 1958, the same paper reported that ‘[r]unning costs and overheads have increased by anything from 200 to 400 per cent since before the war – yet cinema prices have gone up only a fraction of that figure’.⁸ These reports offer a glimpse of the constraints that cinemas faced in the post-war years. How they adapted to these challenges to provide entertainment for their patrons is one of this book’s key concerns.

The operation of cinemas, however, cannot be fully understood without consideration of the audiences who regularly paid to see their favourite stars projected on the silver screen. People chose to spend their time and money at the cinema in preference to other forms of commercial leisure. While these people increasingly opted to spend their disposable income on other activities and goods, cinema-going remained a profoundly important social activity and provided a great deal of pleasure for millions of UK citizens. The cinema was more than just a place to watch films; it provided a range of important social functions, such as a site for children to congregate on Saturday mornings or a darkened space for courting couples to meet free from parental supervision. Many of the routines of cinema attendance were similar in Belfast and Sheffield. But by contrasting the responses to certain customs, such as the playing of the British national anthem at the end of an evening’s performance, this book puts geographical variations in attitudes and behaviour into sharp relief.

There was no single cinema-going experience and age, class, gender and location were all key determinants of cinema attendance. In 1949, Mark Abrams found that the most frequent cinema-goers were female, young and working class.⁹ During the 1950s, cinema audiences were increasingly male and the proportion of sixteen- to twenty-four-year-olds increased dramatically. Sue Harper and Vincent Porter claimed that these changes ‘were so extensive that they affected patterns of popularity’ and that the film industry struggled to cope with variations in audience taste.¹⁰ Audience habits and the nature of attendance changed as post-war austerity gave way to increased affluence and a burgeoning consumer society. During the 1950s, rising incomes, population shifts, the introduction of television, new forms of youth culture and a greater range of leisure activities were some of the myriad factors that contributed to the rapid decline in cinema attendance. By the mid 1960s, cinema-going was still popular, especially among the young working class, yet it was no longer the predominant leisure activity in the United Kingdom. Many of the first cinemas to close were smaller local neighbourhood venues and, while many people attended the cinema less frequently, greater amounts of disposable income meant that they were prepared to spend more on individual trips to larger, more luxurious city centre and suburban cinemas. Another key development was the shift towards home-oriented consumption. As Richard Farmer stated, ‘the declining appeal of the cinema, both absolutely and relatively, needs to be assessed vis-à-vis the growing appeal of the home’.¹¹ Economic gains also led to increased car and television ownership and greater expenditure on consumer goods. These gains, however, were geographically uneven and it is clear that many people in working-class areas were unable to participate in the benefits of the affluent society.

Post-war social scientists and subsequent historians have debated the relative importance of the factors that led to cinema’s decline. In the early 1960s, a group of exhibitors, distributors and producers asked economist John Spraos to examine the problems facing the industry. In 1962, he published a statistical report analysing cinema’s demise, the industry’s response and implications for future policy. He cited the growth in working-class television ownership, the closure of neighbourhood cinemas, increased travel distances, less frequent public transport and higher admission prices as key factors in cinema’s decline.¹² The Broadcasting Research Unit’s 1987 report downplayed a monocausal relationship between television and cinema, arguing that ‘television was framed; the real culprits were Elvis Presley, expresso [sic] coffee, the Town and Country Planning Act of 1947 and the sclerosis of the British film industry’.¹³ Stuart Hanson also de-emphasized the causal relationship between cinema and television, placing greater emphasis on the changing nature of consumer capitalism and the emergence of the ‘affluent society’. He acknowledged a wide range of factors and observed that television ownership, the growth of consumerism and the relocation of working-class communities all contributed to the decline in cinema attendance.¹⁴ Only by digging deeper into the source material can we assess the relative impact of these factors at a regional level.

The findings presented here also make a broader contribution to the social and cultural history of post-war Britain and Ireland. Leisure historian Jeffrey Hill observed that the interwar years have received far more attention than the post-war period and this study builds on the work of social historians, such as Claire Langhamer and Adrian Horn, who have investigated post-war women’s leisure and juke boxes respectively.¹⁵ It follows Brett Bebber’s assertion that ‘in neglecting close attention to the political and social contexts from which forms of leisure emerged and developed, historians risk separating their analysis of leisure and how people enjoyed them from the structural and material circumstances in which people lived’.¹⁶ Its chronology allows also for a reconsideration of social change in the 1950s in a broader context. In 2008, Nick Thomas asserted that the 1950s has ‘often been dealt with as an interim period between the decades standing on either side, and in particular as a kind of antechamber of the social upheaval of the 1960s’.¹⁷ In their authoritative account of 1950s British cinema, Harper and Porter reconsidered a misunderstood decade ‘widely perceived as being a dull period – an interregnum sandwiched between the inventive 1940s and the exciting 1960s’.¹⁸ Detailed regional case studies show that the 1950s was neither an antechamber nor an interregnum. The decade’s social changes had a clear and profound impact on leisure patterns, consumer taste and people’s engagement with popular culture, marking a momentous period of change for both cinemas and the cities that housed them. It is for this for this reason that this book investigates how changes to the built environment and the spaces of film exhibition shaped patterns of post-war cinema attendance.

A tale of two cities

The regional approach taken in this book allows us to go beyond the peculiarities and idiosyncrasies of a single location. It is a response to Richard Maltby’s assertion that new cinema history ‘requires its practitioners to work out how to undertake small-scale practicable projects that, whatever their local explanatory aims, also have the capacity for comparison, aggregation and scaling’.¹⁹ It also addresses the suggestion of Kuhn et al.that a positive step towards understanding cinema-going habits is comparative work between cities and regions within a single country.²⁰ There are several excellent national studies, such as Trevor Griffiths’s book on Scottish cinema-going in the first half of the twentieth century and Peter Miskell’s social history of cinema in Wales. ²¹ The national scope of these studies, however, means that they are often unable to pay close attention to the local context required to compare particular communities. Meanwhile, local studies often fail to place their conclusions in a broader context and to connect their findings to those in other localities. The focus on two medium-sized industrial cities in different parts of the United Kingdom closes this lacuna. It follows the example of Robert James, who emphasized local sources to investigate cinema-going in interwar Portsmouth, Derby and South Wales. He then linked these examples to broader national trends and to other leisure activities to assess the geographical diversity of film consumption.²²

In the period under review, Belfast and Sheffield relied on a small number of labour-intensive industries, were populated by large numbers of skilled labourers and displayed low levels of immigration. In both cities, slum clearance, new housing developments and employment changes resulted in centrifugal population shifts. Despite these surface similarities, Belfast and Sheffield faced different social pressures and developed along separate trajectories. These changes affected the everyday leisure habits of their citizens in specific ways and this book examines how localized factors impacted on cinema exhibition and attendance. While cinema-going habits varied between neighbourhoods, communities and cities, the existence of separate local and national governments meant that cinemas operated in different regulatory frameworks. Cinemas in Belfast and Sheffield, for instance, were subject to different rates of taxation, film quota legislation and Sunday opening laws.

Belfast is the largest city in Northern Ireland, which comprises the six counties which remained part of the United Kingdom after the 1921 partition of Ireland. Though the city is infamous for the sectarian divisions between Protestants and Catholics, Sean O’Connell highlighted that it was subject to many of the same developments as other UK industrial cities. He characterizes the years from 1914 to 1968 in Belfast as a period of ‘conservative modernity … marked by a dichotomy between new forms of work, consumption and recreation and a regressive cultural politics’.²³ Belfast grew rapidly in the late nineteenth century and was the industrial heartland of the province of Ulster, noted for its shipbuilding industry and the large numbers of women employed in its tobacco factories and textile mills. In 1944, trade journal Kinematograph Weekly (hereafter Kine Weekly) claimed that it ‘lives, eats, dreams and thinks in terms of the building of ships, of aircraft, of naval bases, of the American Army, of the German “blitz” that has left gaping wounds in its narrow, dirty streets and in its gaunt buildings’.²⁴ The war had a long-lasting effect on the built environment with slum areas and bomb-sites remaining well into the 1950s, when its population stood at 443,680.²⁵ Traditional industries declined after the war, though new jobs were created on greenfield sites and there was an increase in public sector and administrative roles.²⁶ While wages and living conditions improved dramatically during the period under review, Graham Brownlow noted that in Northern Ireland ‘unemployment was considerably higher, and incomes per head generally much lower, than the UK average’.²⁷ Journalists often highlighted Belfast’s geographical and cultural distance from its counterparts in England, Scotland and Wales. In 1954, for instance, Picture Post noted the city’s cultural conservatism, describing it as a city ‘as different from the rest of the United Kingdom as pickles from suet pudding: a city that builds great ships – and has grave unemployment; where religion is a fire – and the police carry guns; where loyalties battle – and jokes are cracked about it’.²⁸ However, a focus on these more conspicuous aspects of Belfast life obscures the fact that it was architecturally and economically similar to many industrial British cities. By looking beyond, but not ignoring, Belfast’s sectarian divisions, we can assess how post-war changes affected everyday leisure habits.

The inclusion of Belfast is a response to Adrian Horn, who, in his study of post-war juke boxes, claimed that the ‘regionality of American popular culture’s reception by young people in Britain is one that could be pursued much further’. He suggested Northern Ireland as an area ‘that should prove to be particularly fruitful for the cultural historian’.²⁹ Given the predominance of Hollywood films in the period under review, this study looks at the relative popularity and impact of American films and builds on the work of historians who have shown the various ways in which American popular culture was received in, and mediated by, communities in various localities.³⁰ The inclusion of Belfast expands the underdeveloped social history of Northern Ireland before the Troubles.³¹ As Kevin Bean observed, scholars often view the post-war years through the prism of the later Troubles failing ‘to situate the post-war development of the region in a broader context as a product of wider and more powerful external forces and ideologies’.³² This book both places Belfast in the broader context of UK cinema-going and contributes to the historiography of cinema on the island of Ireland. While there are many studies that successfully address the experiences of post-war cinema-goers, they are related mostly to the British rather than the Irish context.³³

In 1956, the Yorkshire city of Sheffield held a population of 526,000 and was known for its industrial workforce and steel industry, which provided its largest source of employment.³⁴ Despite the success of this industry, journalist Joan Skipsey painted a bleak picture of post-war Sheffield, warning that the ‘casual visitor to the city is likely to go away without a clue as to the grounds for confidence. Whichever station he arrives at, a bleak expanse of roadway confronts him, unadorned by welcoming café or suggestion of metropolis’.³⁵ In 1954, The Economist observed that ‘[t]here is nothing showy about Sheffield. Unlike the typical mercantile city, it has no fine buildings, no great tradition in art or music’. It added, nonetheless, that an ‘unexpected attraction of Sheffield is the indefinable air of romance that haunts the ugly, smoky streets’.³⁶ In the 1950s, the numbers employed in manufacturing declined and there was a considerable increase in those occupied in construction, distribution and professional services.³⁷ Despite this, in 1957, 650 of the UK’s 700 cutlery firms were still located in Sheffield, and, in 1961, over 44 per cent of its working population were employed in engineering and metals.³⁸ In 1962, sociologist M. P. Carter observed that the city housed a large working-class population and that women were ‘restricted to employment as clerks, shop assistants and factory workers’.³⁹ The perception of Sheffield as a solely industrial city persisted into the 1960s, when journalist Stan Gee stated that any claim ‘that Sheffield can be classed as an entertainments centre is more than likely to be greeted with derision’.⁴⁰

A regional analysis of Belfast and Sheffield contributes to the historiography of both cities. Belfast is served by many general historical surveys and edited collections that provide a wealth of information across a broad time period.⁴¹ Details of Belfast’s historical cinemas are well documented and studies by scholars such as John Hill and Kevin Rockett provide assessments of film production, exhibition and distribution in Northern Ireland.⁴² While David Fowler has assessed Northern Ireland’s youth culture, there has been little focused analysis of its citizen’s everyday leisure and social habits.⁴³ There are few historical surveys of Sheffield and, in 2011, David Hey observed that his general survey was the first since the 1948 publication of Mary Walton’s Sheffield: its Story and its Achievements.⁴⁴ Aside from several local publications documenting Sheffield’s historical cinemas, the history of post-war Sheffield often excludes its leisure habits and focuses on its socialist politics, steel industry and public housing schemes, such as Park Hill.⁴⁵

The growth and development of cinema was broadly similar in Belfast and Sheffield. From its emergence in the late nineteenth century, cinema’s provision of affordable and accessible entertainment guaranteed its popularity, particularly among the urban working class. By the outbreak of the First World War, there were 3,500 British cinemas and weekly cinema admissions increased from 7 million in 1914 to over 20 million in 1917.⁴⁶ While a variety of Sheffield’s halls and theatres exhibited films from 1896 onwards, its first purpose-built cinema, the Union Street Picture Palace, opened in August 1910. The construction of twenty-nine cinemas between 1910 and 1915 marked the city’s first cinema building boom.⁴⁷ The development of Belfast’s cinema exhibition industry mirrored many industrial British cities and the number of Belfast cinemas increased from sixteen at the outbreak of the First World War to twenty-six in 1920.⁴⁸

The interwar years were characterized by the switch from silent to sound cinema, the introduction of legislation designed to protect the British film industry, the construction of larger suburban cinemas and the growth of the three major circuits: Associated British Cinemas (ABC), Gaumont and Odeon.⁴⁹ In the 1920s, fifteen new Sheffield cinemas opened and the 1927 Kinematograph Year Book lists forty-five operational venues.⁵⁰ The lack of new housing developments and the large British circuit’s limited presence in Northern Ireland meant that only two Belfast cinemas opened in the 1920s and, by 1927, it had twenty-five cinemas.⁵¹ However, seventeen new Belfast cinemas were constructed in the 1930s, the majority of which were located on the main arterial roads leading away from its city centre. Admissions rose in the 1930s and the cinema remained an inexpensive, exciting and pleasurable activity in a period of poverty and economic hardship for many working-class patrons. Cinema’s social appeal widened and the middle-classes were drawn to the new upmarket city centre and suburban ‘picture palaces’. Cinema-going was often habitual and many patrons went several times a week, irrespective of what was shown. By 1939, UK cinema admissions totalled 990 million and there were thirty-nine cinemas listed in Belfast. In Sheffield there were fifty-two venues listed, with an estimated seating capacity of 56,300.⁵²

Higher wages, a greater need for relaxation and reduced competition from alternative leisure activities meant that cinema attendance increased dramatically during the Second World War. Towns and cities across the UK and Ireland housed a range of cinemas, which were a visible presence in, and central to the communal life of, city centres, suburbs and inner-city neighbourhoods. In 1948, Rachael Low estimated that there were 4,706 cinemas in Great Britain and the Kinematograph Year Book lists a further 120 cinemas in Northern Ireland.⁵³ The Economist noted that while approximately 2,000 cinemas were ‘of good modern standard’, the rest were ‘small, locality houses which deserve none of the superlatives of the industry and show old films of poor quality’.⁵⁴ There was a great contrast between local neighbourhood ‘fleapits’ and city centre ‘picture palaces’; venues varied widely in terms of price, programming, seating capacity, décor, amenities, clientele and status.

As attendances fell dramatically during the 1950s many cinemas closed down. In April 1950, the Board of Trade estimated that there were 4,583 cinemas operating in Great Britain with a total seating capacity of 4,221,200.⁵⁵ By 1965, these figures fell to 1,971 and 2,012,600 respectively.⁵⁶ In Sheffield, while two new city centre first-run cinemas opened in 1956 and 1961, thirty-nine cinemas closed from 1957 to 1965. In 1956, Belfast was served by forty-four cinemas with a total seating capacity of 40,000.⁵⁷ While several new cinemas were built in Belfast suburbs in the mid 1950s, attendances fell precipitously and the number of Belfast cinemas declined to thirty-seven by 1961, and to thirty-one by 1963.⁵⁸ No further venues closed until 1966.

These developments should be understood in a broader geographical context. Cinema attendance fell elsewhere, though there were wide international variations in the nature of this decline. In the United States, where television penetrated homes earlier than in the UK, average weekly admissions fell from their peak of 90 million in 1946 to 60 million in 1950 and 40 million in 1960.⁵⁹ The 1946 peak in UK cinema attendances was earlier than in other European nations such as France (1947), Italy (1955) and West Germany (1956).⁶⁰ In the Republic of Ireland, cinema-going retained its popularity for longer than in Northern Ireland and cinema admissions fell from their peak of 54.1 million in 1954, to 43.8 million in 1959 and to 30 million in 1965.⁶¹ Audiences also fell out of love with the cinema at different rates, with Sedgwick et al. observing that the ‘dramatic decline in attendance seen in the United States, United Kingdom, and elsewhere in the 1950s and 1960s did not occur in Italy until the 1970s’.⁶²

Sources and methodology

How can historians access the everyday cinema experiences of individuals, communities and neighbourhoods? Richard Maltby advocated the use of localized oral history projects in new cinema history as they ‘consistently tell us that the local rhythms of motion picture circulation and the qualities of the experience of cinema attendance were place-specific and shaped by the continuities of life in the family, the workplace, the neighbourhood and the community’.⁶³ This book follows scholars who use memory as a tool to investigate historical experiences of cinema attendance across the UK.⁶⁴ The most recent of these is the ‘Cultural Memory and British Cinemagoing of the 1960s’ project, led by Melvyn Stokes, which has gathered responses from 893 questionnaires and eighty interviews.⁶⁵ This book deploys oral history testimony gathered from fifty residents (nineteen female, thirty-one male) of Belfast and Sheffield born between 1925 and 1950, the majority of whom self-identified as working class.⁶⁶ Interviewees were recruited through interaction with local community groups, recommendations from colleagues and contacts from previous projects. They were drawn from a wide age range and from different geographical areas within Belfast and Sheffield. They displayed wide variation in their cinema-going habits, the venues they attended and their levels of film consumption. Participants were offered the option of anonymity, though only three interviewees requested the use of a pseudonym. While aliases protect the identity of participants and can encourage them to speak more candidly, they treat people as representatives rather than as individuals and clash with many of social history’s fundamental objectives. This research follows Donald Ritchie’s statement that, ‘[h]aving sought to give “voice to the voiceless”, it is inconsistent to render them nameless’.⁶⁷

Given that details of historical cinemas in Belfast and Sheffield, such as location, opening date and seating capacity, are already well documented, the main purpose of the interviews was not to gather empirical information. Rather, it was to uncover emotional responses, to gather unique memories of cinema-going, to understand what the cinema meant to interviewees, and to reveal where they placed their memories in relation to their broader social and leisure lives. Rather than ask participants to narrate their life histories, the interviews followed a thematic approach and questions focused on the social background of the participants, memories of cinema-going, film preferences, leisure habits and the wider social history of post-war Belfast and Sheffield. While a questionnaire was used throughout the interviews, participants were free to discuss other subjects and digressions from the topic of cinema-going were often revealing in situating the place of cinema-going in participants’ wider social lives. These sources are assessed critically by acknowledging that memory texts do not provide a transparent view of the past. As Matthew Jones observed, cinema memory is constructed rather than simply recalled, recollections are shaped by the context in which they are collected and there are problems of selective memory, misremembering and hindsight. He argued that memory itself should become the object of study and analysed as discourse rather than data.⁶⁸

Oral history interviewees are not the only sources available to investigate the social and spatial elements of cinema attendance, and this is not an oral history of cinemas and cinema-going like Annette Kuhn’s pioneering ethnography of 1930s film audiences.⁶⁹ Rather, it is a history of cinemas and cinema-going that uses a range of primary source material to complement oral history testimony. Memories provide personal, subjective and socially constructed accounts, and they both corroborate and challenge the evidence provided by box-office returns, cinema records, newspapers, council minutes and trade journals. This book uses a combination of qualitative and quantitative sources and emphasises the use of box-office statistics, business records and financial data. This broad range of sources allows us to drill down into the specific institutional arrangements in the two cities and then link these to audience experiences and the operation of cinemas. Historians such as John Sedgwick have developed statistical models to investigate interwar cinema-going, and Sue Harper and Robert James have analysed film ledgers to demonstrate the tastes of specific social groups.⁷⁰ James, however, lamented that ‘very few film ledgers remain extant, so it is extremely difficult to deploy this type of material to make definitive taste comparisons between the classes’.⁷¹ Belfast and Sheffield, however, are relatively well served by records of cinema attendance. There are weekly summaries of Entertainments Duty for many Belfast cinemas, which provide the basis for a comparative assessment of the popularity of particular films.⁷² For Sheffield, the records of the Rex, the Cartoon Cinema (later the Classic) and the Library Theatre provide an insight into various sites and forms of exhibition.⁷³

The extensive scrutiny of local sources provides greater detail of regional developments, challenging the conclusions of historians who make broader generalizations about national trends in cinema-going. Newspapers reports in the Belfast Telegraph and the Sheffield Star show how changes in cinema-going were reported in regional contexts in relation to wider social and economic developments. In the period under review, the former had an estimated daily circulation of between 195,000 and 200,000 copies, and an adult readership of over 600,000.⁷⁴ Both papers were the most widely circulated in their respective cities and are those most commonly cited by cinema-goers in oral history interviews. It is likely that the journalistic processes of framing and selection adopted by these papers shaped the way that citizens understood the post-war decline in cinema attendance. The placement of articles within these newspapers also shows how cinema-going related to other aspects of daily life such as work, housing and alternative leisure activities. The use of council minutes reveals how Belfast Corporation and Sheffield City Council licenced and regulated cinemas. As Farmer stated, ‘the power exercised by local laws and local licensing authorities and watch committees meant that cinema exhibition was shaped by the specificities of place, evolving in response to local events, cultures, tastes and prejudices’.⁷⁵ These local sources are supplemented by reports in national weekly trade journal Kine Weekly, which although rarely read by cinema-goers, provides a rich source of information on exhibition, distribution and promotion. It often published columns dedicated to Belfast and Sheffield and included comprehensive reports on local branch meetings of the Cinematograph Exhibitors’ Association (CEA). These sources are deployed to convey the diverse nature of the cinema industry and the importance of place as a determinant of cinema attendance. By assessing two local case studies alongside national developments, and by placing these findings in a broader social and cultural context, it is possible to provide the necessary detail for a more nuanced picture of post-war cinema-going across the UK.

The book is divided into five chapters that collectively show the extent to which residents of Belfast and Sheffield constituted distinct cinema communities. The first chapter investigates what the experience of cinema-going was like and how it corresponded to other aspects of daily life. Cinemas were social spaces and it examines audience behaviour and the social practices of cinema-going. It looks at the social and economic distinctions patrons made between cinemas, film reception and the relationship between cinema-going and the life cycle. Chapter 2 places these findings in the broader context of cinema’s decline and assesses the extent to which television was responsible for the fall in cinema attendance. It then examines the impact of new forms of youth culture and the response of cinema exhibitors. Chapter 3 focuses on the relationship between cinema-going and the built environment and on the place of cinemas within the topography of Belfast and Sheffield. It explores the small number of cinemas that opened in this period, the greater number of cinemas that closed and the reasons the local press gave for these closures. It also looks at how perceptions of cinemas changed and how they were viewed within their respective cities. The final two chapters assess the operation of cinemas, the service they provided to customers and the ways that patrons consumed films. In these chapters, financial data is combined with programme listings to build a profile of film preferences and attendance patterns. Chapter 4 investigates the implementation of Entertainments Duty in Northern Ireland and uses quantitative records kept by the Northern Ireland Ministry of Finance to compare cinema programming and audience preferences in five Belfast cinemas from 1948 to 1961. The final chapter uses the records of three Sheffield venues to investigate film exhibition across the period. These records display the diversity of film exhibition in Sheffield and the relationship between programming, admissions and box-office revenue.

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¹ For further information on recent developments in audience studies see D. Biltereyst and P. Meers, ‘Film, cinema and reception studies: revisiting research on audience’s filmic and cinematic experiences’, in Reception Studies and Audiovisual Translation, ed. E. Di Giovanni and Y. Gambier (Amsterdam, 2018), pp. 21–42.

² D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby and P. Meers, ‘Cinema, audiences and modernity: an introduction’, in Cinema, Audiences and Modernity: New Perspectives on European Cinema History, ed. D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby and P. Meers (Abingdon, 2012), pp. 1–16, at p. 2. See also Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (Chichester, 2011); The Routledge Companion to New Cinema History, ed. D. Biltereyst, R. Maltby and P. Meers (Abingdon, 2019).

³ R. C. Allen, ‘The place of space in film historiography’, in Tijdschrift voor Mediageschiedenis, ix (2006), 15–27; J. Klenotic, ‘Putting cinema history on the map: using GIS to explore the spatiality in cinema’, in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (Chichester, 2011), pp. 58–84; P. Ercole, D. Treveri Gennari and C. O’Rawe, ‘Mapping cinema memories: emotional geographies of cinemagoing in Rome in the 1950s’, Memory Studies, x (2017), 63–77.

⁴ B. Doyle, ‘The geography of cinemagoing in Great Britain, 1934–1994: a comment’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xxiii (2003), 59–71, at p. 59.

⁵ R Farmer, Cinemas and Cinema-Going in Wartime Britain: the Utility Dream Palace (Manchester, 2016).

⁶ Belfast Telegraph, 7 May 1945.

⁷ Entertainment Tax (also referred to as Entertainments Duty by the Northern Ireland Government) was a sales tax on cinema tickets introduced in 1916 and abolished in 1961.

⁸ Belfast Telegraph, 14 Feb. 1958.

⁹ M. Abrams, ‘The British cinema audience, 1949’, Hollywood Quarterly, iv (1950), 251–5.

¹⁰ S. Harper and V. Porter, ‘Cinema audience tastes in 1950s Britain’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, ii (1999), 66–82, at p. 67.

¹¹ Farmer, Cinemas and Cinema-going, p. 241.

¹² J. Spraos, The Decline of the Cinema: an Economist’s Report (London, 1962).

¹³ D. Docherty, D. Morrison and M. Tracey, The Last Picture Show? Britain’s Changing Film Audiences (London, 1987), p. 5.

¹⁴ S. Hanson, From Silent Screen to Multi-Screen: a History of Cinema Exhibition in Britain Since 1896 (Manchester, 2007).

¹⁵ J. Hill, ‘“What shall we do with them when they’re not working?”: leisure and historians in Britain’, in Leisure and Cultural Conflict in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. B. Bebber (Manchester, 2012), pp. 11–40, at pp. 31–2; C. Langhamer, Women’s Leisure in England (Manchester, 2000); A. Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (Manchester, 2010).

¹⁶ B. Bebber, ‘Introduction: Contextualising leisure history’, in Leisure and Cultural Conflict in Twentieth-Century Britain, ed. B. Bebber (Manchester, 2012), pp. 1–10, at p. 1.

¹⁷ N. Thomas, ‘Review essay: will the real 1950s please stand up? Views of a contradictory decade’, Cultural and Social History, v (2008), 227–36, at p. 228.

¹⁸ S. Harper and V. Porter, British Cinema of the 1950s: the Decline of Deference (Oxford, 2003), p. 1.

¹⁹ R. Maltby, ‘New cinema histories’, in Explorations in New Cinema History: Approaches and Case Studies, ed. R. Maltby, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers (Chichester, 2011), pp. 3–40, at p. 13.

²⁰ A. Kuhn, D. Biltereyst and P. Meers, ‘Memories of cinema-going and film experience: an introduction’, Memory Studies, x (2017), 3–16, at p. 11.

²¹ T. Griffiths, The Cinema and Cinema-Going in Scotland, 1896–1950 (Edinburgh, 2013); P. Miskell, A Social History of the Cinema in Wales, 1918–1951 (Cardiff, 2006).

²² R. James, Popular Culture and Working-Class Taste in Britain 1930–1939: a Round of Cheap Diversions? (Manchester, 2010).

²³ S. O’Connell, ‘An age of conservative modernity, 1914–1968’, in Belfast 400: People, Place and History, ed. S. Connolly (Liverpool, 2012), pp. 271–316, at p. 315.

²⁴ Kinematograph Weekly, 13 Jan. 1944.

²⁵ The Ulster Year Book: the Official Year Book of Northern Ireland (Belfast, 1953), p. 35.

²⁶ W. Maguire, Belfast: a History (Lancaster, 2009), pp. 213–17.

²⁷ G. Brownlow, ‘Business and labour since 1945’, in Ulster since 1600: Politics and Society, ed. L. Kennedy and P. Ollerenshaw (Oxford, 2012), pp. 291–307, at p. 292.

²⁸ Picture Post, 20 Feb. 1954.

²⁹ Horn, Juke Box Britain, p. 193.

³⁰ P. Swann, The Hollywood Feature Film in Postwar Britain (London, 1987); M. Glancy, Hollywood and the Americanization of Britain: From the 1920s to the Present (London, 2014); Hollywood Abroad: Audiences and Cultural Exchange, ed. R. Maltby and M. Stokes (London, 2004); Identifying Hollywood’s Audiences: Cultural Identity and the Movies, ed. R. Maltby and M. Stokes (London, 1999); American Movie Audiences: from the Turn of the Century to the Early Sound Era, ed. R. Maltby and M. Stokes (London, 1999); Hollywood Spectatorship: Changing Perceptions of Cinemas Audiences, ed. R. Maltby and M. Stokes (London, 2001).

³¹ Notable exceptions include M. Elliott, Hearthlands: a Memoir of the White City Housing Estate in Belfast (Belfast, 2017) and J. Crangle, ‘“Left to fend for themselves”: immigration, race relations and the state in twentieth century Northern Ireland’, Immigrants and Minorities, xxxvi (2018), 20–44.

³² K. Bean, ‘Roads not taken’, in Belfast Exposed Photography, Portraits from a 50’s Archive (Belfast, 2005), pp. 8–19, at p. 8.

³³ Notable exceptions include S. McBride and R. Flynn, Here’s Looking at you, Kid! Ireland goes to the Pictures (Dublin, 1996); H. Byrne, ‘“Going to the pictures”: the female audience and the pleasures of cinema’, in Media Audiences in Ireland, ed. M. Kelly and B. O’Connor (Dublin, 1997), pp 88–106; D. McGuinness, ‘Media consumption and Dublin working class cultural identity’ (unpublished Dublin City University PhD thesis, 1999); E. O’Leary, Youth and Popular Culture in 1950s Ireland (2018); G. Finlay, ‘“Celluloid menace”, art or the “essential habit of the age”?’, History Ireland, xv (2007), 34–40.

³⁴ S. Pollard, ‘The growth of population’, in Sheffield and its Region: a Scientific and Historical Survey, ed. D. L. Linton (Sheffield, 1956), pp. 172–80, at pp. 179–80.

³⁵ Illustrated, 31 May 1947, quoted in Damned Bad Place, Sheffield: Anthology of Writing About Sheffield Through the Ages, ed. S. Pybus (Sheffield, 1994), p. 217.

³⁶ The Economist, 16 Jan. 1954.

³⁷ W. Hampton, Democracy and Community: a Study of Politics in Sheffield (London, 1970), p. 47.

³⁸ D. Hey, A History of Sheffield (Lancaster, 2011), p. 280; Hampton, Democracy and Community, p. 40.

³⁹ M. P. Carter, Home, School and Work: a Study of the Education and Employment of Young People in Britain (Oxford, 1962), p. 18.

⁴⁰ The Star, 27 Feb. 1964.

⁴¹ Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century, ed. F. W. Boal and S. A. Royle (Belfast, 2006); Belfast 400: People, Place and History, ed. S. Connolly (Liverpool, 2012); Maguire, Belfast: a History.

⁴² M. Open, Fading Lights, Silver Screen: a History of Belfast Cinemas (Antrim, 1985); J. Doherty, Standing Room Only: Memories of Belfast Cinemas (Belfast, 1997); T. Hughes, How Belfast Saw the Light: a Cinematic History (Newtonards, 2014); Belfast Public Libraries, Irish and Local Studies Department, Checklist of Belfast Cinemas (Belfast, 1979); P. Larmour, ‘Cinema paradiso’, Perspective, iv (1996), 23–7; ‘The big feature’, Perspective, v (1997), 29–36; J. Hill, Cinema and Northern Ireland: Film, Culture and Politics (2006); K. Rockett with E. Rockett, Film Exhibition and Distribution in Ireland, 1909–2010 (Dublin, 2011).

⁴³ D. Fowler, Youth Culture in Modern Britain, c.1920–c.1970 (Basingstoke, 2008).

⁴⁴ Hey, A History of Sheffield, p. viii.

⁴⁵ Sheffield Cinema Society, The A.B.C. of the Cinemas of Sheffield (Sheffield, 1993); C. Shaw and S. Smith, Sheffield Cinemas: Past and Present (Sheffield, 1999); P. Tuffrey, South Yorkshire’s Cinemas and Theatres (Stroud, 2011); R. Ward, In Memory of Sheffield’s Cinemas (Sheffield, 1988).

⁴⁶ N. Hiley, ‘“Let’s go to the pictures”: the British cinema audience in the 1920s and 1930s’, Journal of Popular British Cinema, ii (1999), 39–53, at p. 40.

⁴⁷ C. Shaw and C. Stacey, ‘A century of cinema’, in Aspects of Sheffield 2: Discovering Local History, ed. M. Jones (Barnsley, 1999), pp. 182–200, at pp. 197–200.

⁴⁸ Rockett, Film Exhibition, p. 37.

⁴⁹ For further information on the major cinema circuits, see A. Eyles, Odeon Cinemas: Oscar Deutsch Entertains our Nation (London, 2001); Odeon Cinemas 2: from J. Arthur Rank to the Multiplex (London, 2005); Gaumont British Cinemas (London, 1996); ABC: the First Name in Entertainment (London, 1993). From 1941, the Rank Organisation operated both the Gaumont and Odeon circuits.

⁵⁰ Kinematograph Year Book 1927 (1927), pp. 392–4.

⁵¹ Kinematograph Year Book 1927 (1927), pp. 445–6.

⁵² Kinematograph Year Book 1939 (1939), pp. 632–4, 710–1; C. Shaw, Images of England: Sheffield Cinemas (Stroud, 2001), p. 8.

⁵³ R. Low, ‘Trade statistics’, in Kinematograph Year Book 1949 (1949), pp. 50–1; Kinematograph Year Book 1948 (1948), pp. 445–9.

⁵⁴ The Economist, 27 Dec. 1947.

⁵⁵ Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract of Statistics 1951, no. 88 (London, 1951), p. 83.

⁵⁶ Central Statistical Office, Annual Abstract of Statistics 1966, no. 103 (London, 1966), p. 81.

⁵⁷ Kinematograph Year Book 1956 (1956), pp. 407–8; Kinematograph Weekly, 5 July 1956; F. W. Boal, ‘Big processes and little people: the population of metropolitan Belfast 1901–2001’, in Enduring City: Belfast in the Twentieth Century, ed. F. W. Boal and S. A. Royle (Belfast, 2006), pp. 57–83, at p. 82.

⁵⁸ Kinematograph and Television Year Book 1961 (London, 1961), pp. 410–11; Kinematograph and Television Year Book 1963 (London, 1963), pp. 353–4.

⁵⁹ United States Census Bureau, The Statistical History of the United States, from Colonial Times to the Present (New York, 1986), p. 400.

⁶⁰ P. Sorlin, European Cinemas, European Societies 1939–1990 (1991), p. 89.

⁶¹ UNESCO, Basic Facts and Figures: International Statistics Relating to Education, Culture and Mass Communication (Paris, 1960), pp. 159–64; Rockett, Film Exhibition, p. 461; E. O’Leary, ‘Teenagers, everyday life and popular culture in 1950s Ireland’ (unpublished National University of Ireland, Maynooth PhD thesis, 2013), pp. 92–3.

⁶² J. Sedgwick, P. Miskell and M. Nicoli, ‘The market for films in postwar Italy: evidence for both national and regional patterns of taste’, Enterprise & Society, xx (2019), 199–228, at p. 204.

⁶³ Maltby, ‘New cinema histories’, p. 9.

⁶⁴ H. Richards, ‘Memory reclamation of cinema going in Bridgend, South Wales, 1930– 1960’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xxiii (2003), 341–55; J. Stacey, Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship (London, 1994), p. 236; A. Kuhn, An Everyday Magic: Cinema and Cultural Memory (London, 2002); Enter the Dream-House: Memories of Cinemas in South London from the Twenties to the Sixties, ed. M. O’Brien and A. Eyles (London, 1993); A. Martin, Going to the Cinema: Scottish Memories of Cinema (Edinburgh, 2000).

⁶⁵ For further information, see ‘Cultural memory and British cinema-going’ <https://www.ucl.ac.uk/library/digital-collections/collections/cinema/index> [accessed 5 June 2019].

⁶⁶ See Appendix 3 for further information on all the interviewees.

⁶⁷ D. A. Ritchie, Doing Oral History (2nd edn, Oxford, 2003), p. 126.

⁶⁸ M. Jones, ‘Memories of British cinema’, in The Routledge Companion to British Cinema History, ed. I. Q. Hunter, L. Porter and J. Smith (Abingdon, 2017), pp. 397–405.

⁶⁹ Kuhn, An Everyday Magic.

⁷⁰ J. Sedgwick, Popular Filmgoing in 1930s Britain: a Choice of Pleasures (Exeter, 2000); S. Harper, ‘A lower middle-class taste community in the 1930s: admissions figures at the Regent cinema, Portsmouth, UK’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xxiv (2004), 565–87; ‘Fragmentation and crisis: 1940s admission figures at the Regent Cinema, Portsmouth, UK’, Historical Journal of Film, Radio and Television, xxvi (2006), 361–94; R. James, ‘Cinema-going in a port town, 1914–1951: film booking patterns at the Queens Cinema, Portsmouth’, Urban History, xl (2013), 315–35.

⁷¹ R. James, ‘Popular film-going in Britain in the 1930s’, Journal of Contemporary History, lxvii (2011), 271–87, at p. 274.

⁷² PRONI, FIN/15/6/A-D, Ministry of Finance records of Entertainments Duty.

⁷³ Sheffield City Archives, MD7333, Rex Cinema (Sheffield) Limited.

⁷⁴ M. Brodie, The Tele: a History of the Belfast Telegraph (Belfast, 1995), p. 112; Belfast Telegraph, 1 March 1963.

⁷⁵ Farmer, Cinemas and Cinemagoing in Wartime Britain, p. 12.