The Mayfair Cinema

On 14 September 1931 the Mayfair Super Cinema opened on College Road, at the Perry Common edge of the new estates, with Owen Nares in The Middle Watch. It was a big house. Cinema Treasures records 1,624 seats in stalls and circle, a proscenium 45 feet wide, and a frontage with a white stone centre and three tall windows over the entrance. The architect was Archibald Hurley Robinson. A little parade of shops, Mayfair Place, went up alongside. The Odeon on the Circle would not open for another four years.

For thirty-two years the Mayfair was the other picture house, and plenty of children liked it best.

The tuppenny crush

Saturday matinées were the heart of it. Charles Southall called it “the ‘tupenny crush’ thing. All the kids in there would throw bits of paper at each other. Good fun!” He sometimes went to the Odeon in the morning and the Mayfair in the afternoon: cowboys and Indians, Buck Rogers, Hopalong Cassidy, Flash Gordon. Pat Burton remembered a cinema that smelled of oranges, the circle throwing peel down on the stalls, everyone shouting “He’s behind ya” at the villains and booing when the projector broke down. Flash Gordon, she noted, was always about to die at the end of an episode and always, the next week, twenty yards clear. Allan Rooke and his friends took their toy six-guns to shoot the baddies; an usherette confiscated them until the end of the show.

Prices depend on who is remembering. Avril Jarvis thought the 1950s matinée cost threepence, and remembered seats at sixpence downstairs and ninepence upstairs. George remembered the Odeon being a penny dearer, which put it out of reach unless it was your birthday.

Richard Wall and his friends walked there from Hurlingham Road along Plumstead Road and through an alley that came out beside the cinema. Sylvie Kennedy, who lived opposite, said most people from Kingstanding came that way, through the passage everyone called “the gully”.

The general on the door

Every child remembered the man in the uniform. “I thought that the man in the uniform was at least a general,” George wrote. Shirley Farrow explained: he was her uncle, Albert Harrison, who lived opposite at 503 College Road and wore a heavily braided uniform that her aunt Edith pressed every day. He complained, she said, about children forever sneaking in and banging the side fire doors. Alvar Baker remembered Mr Harrison as the manager around 1940; perhaps he was both, at different times.

The manager most people describe was tall and white-haired and carried a cane. He tapped unruly boys with it as he walked the aisle, and he once caught Dorothy Capewell smuggling a friend in under her coat: “How long have you had 4 feet?”

It was a family business in more ways than one. Alvar Baker’s mother was the cashier, her sister an usherette and his uncle Peter a projectionist. Michael Dickerson’s mother and two aunts worked there as usherettes and an ice-cream lady. Frances Mayall got in free because her friend’s mother worked in the sweet shop next door.

A sad ride home

Not every memory is happy. Richard Wall remembered a group of children coming home from the Mayfair by bus, arguing over bus tickets. When the bus stopped at Cranbourne Road by the Settlement, one of the boys chased eight-year-old Margaret Everett, and she ran into the road and was killed by a tanker lorry. Seventy years later her niece found his comment and wrote from Canada to thank him for still remembering her.

The Aldi car park

The Mayfair closed on 25 January 1964, and was later demolished. Behind the shops, Voices of Kingstanding records, a small firm called Radiator Developments, later RD Manufacturing, worked from 1946 into the 1990s. Today the cinema’s site is the car park of the Aldi on College Road.

Park there, and you are standing where half the estate once learned to boo the villain.