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Shock treatment: the rediscovery of London's Electric Cinema
Shock treatment: the rediscovery of London's Electric Cinema. Published in The Sunday Times, 4.3.01. Film buffs argue endlessly about when the first real motion picture was made. Architecture buffs fall out over what, exactly, was the first purpose-built cinema. But everybody agrees on one thing: the Edwardian picture house known as the Electric Cinema, in London's Notting Hill, is a fine and important building. It is an rare survival of the first, intimate form of the cinema, and a world away from the huge, glitzy picture palaces of the 1930s.The good news is that it functions once more as a working cinema. The Electric, closed and decaying for years, has been restored and reopened, at a cost of more than £2m.
Not a lot changed over the rest of the 20th century. Valentin went missing, presumed dead, in the Great War. The Electric updated itself for sound in the 1930s. In the post-war years, when its end of the Portobello Road verging on Ladbroke Grove went downhill rapidly, it became the archetypal fleapit. It changed hands, closed and reopened several times. But one fan in the early 1970s was a hippy market trader living in a nearby squat, who sold smelly Afghan sheepskin coats on a Saturday. His name was Peter Simon. Simon now runs the Monsoon retail fashion chain from an HQ in the next street. And he has put up his own money to restore the Electric for 2001. Simon sees this as payback time for the area he loves. "I'll be happy if I can leave the Electric in a good state. I can truthfully tell you that it is not profitable," he says. "It's not viable on its own - many have tried. The only way is to have a successful restaurant, bar, film bookshop and so on next door. That's what we're doing: it'll be about six months before the restaurant is up and running."
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When the architect Gilbert Seymour Valentin designed the Electric in 1910, the silent film industry was already a potent force. The basic mechanism of modern moving film projectors had been invented in the 1890s, while the advent of a reliable power supply had been hastened by such contemporary technological wonders as the London underground railway. Even Queen Victoria's Jubilee celebrations had been filmed, and the film survives. So the Electric tapped into a national, expansionist and confident mood. 600 or more people at a time used to buy tickets at the little fairground-style booth in the tiny foyer, and cram into its barrel-vaulted auditorium to watch the jerky, flickering images within the screen's neoclassical frame - accompanied sometimes by a piano on the stage in front. 